Hills Like White Elephants: Elements

Plot Summary

By Michael J. Cummings...© 2007 .

.......On a hot day at a train station in Zaragoza, Spain, a man and woman sit at a table on the shady side of the building while they prepare to order drinks. Because only the man speaks Spanish, he orders for them—first beer, and then Anís del Toro (absinthe, a powerful liqueur). A set of tracks runs on each side of the station. The train for Madrid will arrive from Barcelona in forty minutes on the sunny side of the building.

.......In front of them, the land is dry. There are no trees. Distant hills appear white in the sun, and the woman says they look like white elephants.

.......While they sip their drinks, their conversation reveals that the woman, Jig, and the man, identified only as an American, are at odds over her pregnancy. She wants the child and hints that she would like to settle down. He wants her to abort the child, saying the procedure “is awfully simple” and “not really anything.” Afterward, he says, life for them can continue as before.

.......Jig observes that the liqueur tastes like licorice. In fact, she says, everything tastes like licorice. Her remark, apparently made out of boredom, irks the man.

.......“Oh, cut it out,” he says.

.......They go back and forth on the question of the child. Jig finally says, perhaps with a taint of sarcasm, that she will have the procedure “because I don’t care about me.” The man says he does not want her to have it “if you feel that way.”

.......Jig gets up and walks to the end of the building. There, she looks around to the land on the other side. She sees trees, grain fields, and the Ebro River, then says, “And we could have all this.” When the man tells her that they can have whatever they want—“We can have the whole world”—Jig says, “It isn’t ours any more . . . And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

.......A woman brings them two more beers and alerts them that their train will arrive in five minutes. The man then carries their two suitcases, each displaying labels from all the hotels at which they lodged, to the other side of the station. When he returns, he asks how she feels. She replies, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

Setting

The action takes place in the mid-1920s at a train station in Zaragoza, a major city in northeastern Spain on the Ebro River. Zaragoza is approximately 170 miles northeast of Madrid. The region around Zaragoza receives scant rainfall. The greenery observed by Jig may have flourished through irrigation.

Characters

Jig: Woman traveling in Europe with a male companion. The author does not disclose whether they are single, engaged, or married; however, it appears likely that they are girlfriend and boyfriend.

The American: Man traveling with Jig.

The Woman: Waitress at the train station.

People in the Barroom

Type of Work

"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story that observes the classical unities--that is, the action follows a single storyline (without subplots) that takes place in one place on a single day. It was published in New York by Scribner's in 1927 as part of a collection, Men Without Women.

Narration, Style, Unanswered Questions

Hemingway wrote “Hills Like White Elephants” in third-person point of view that limits the narration to what the characters say and do; it does not reveal their thoughts. Hemingway's style—developed in part when he worked as a newspaper reporter and correspondent early in his career—is simple and compact, with short sentences and paragraphs devoid of verbosity. Adjectives and adverbs are few. However, this straightforward style, which he used in all his major novels and short stories, often conveys complex themes and suggests—but does not explicitly state—motives, mind-sets, attitudes, and so on. In this respect, Hemingway is imitating life, for seldom do two interacting human beings—for example, you and your teacher, you and your spouse, or you and your boss—know each other’s intimate thoughts. You usually must guess at what he or she is thinking; you must interpret. Among the questions the narration does not answer are the following:

1. How do Jig and the American support themselves? Is he one of the members of the so-called lost generation, a group of writers who ....knocked about Europe in the 1920s after being alienated by American values? Does one of them come from a wealthy family?
   
2. What is Jig's nationality? The author refers to the man as an American, possibly implying that she is from England, Canada, Australia, ....or another nation where English is spoken.
3. Are Jig and the American single, engaged, or married? It seems likely that they are single, but the narrator never explicitly says so.
4. What happens to Jig and the American after they leave the train station?

.

Themes

Confronting the Future

Jig and the American have been traveling in Europe from hotel to hotel in pursuit of pleasure. However, at Zaragoza, Jig expresses dissatisfaction with their nomadic existence, especially now that she is pregnant. For her, Zaragoza represents a moment of truth, a crossroads at which they must confront their future. She apparently wants to have the baby and settle down to a normal life, symbolized from her perspective by the greenery and thriving grain fields on one side of the station. He wants her to abort their baby so that they can continue their adventures. Carpe diem!—seize the day!—that is his rule for living. In an attempt to persuade him that they are going in the wrong direction, Jig says their life has become boring and repetitive: “That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” But the man sloughs off her question and renews his attempt to break down her resistance to the abortion. One problem for her is that she has difficulty asserting herself. She even asks his permission when she wants a drink. For example, when he mentions Anís del Toro, she says, “Could we try it?” Later, she says, “Should we have another drink?” Near the end of the story, she asks, “Could we have another beer?” When he continues to press the issue of an abortion, she becomes frustrated and says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” Just before the train arrives, he asks her how she feels. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” Whether these last two sentences of the story mean that she has decided to choose the baby over the abortion, or vice versa—or simply decided to put off a decision for another day—is a matter for the reader to interpret.

Inability to Communicate Effectively

Jig and the American have difficulty articulating their feelings. Rather than bluntly stating their views, they imply, hint, euphemize. In the end, their conversation frustrates Jig, who tells the American, "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Selfishness

The man appears to be manipulating Jig in order to perpetuate a lifestyle in which she is a convenient outlet for his libido. He is even willing to sacrifice a human life, Jill’s unborn child, so that he can continue their joyride.

Too Much of a Good Thing

The ancient Greeks had a saying: "All things in moderation; nothing in excess." But Jig and the American have apparently been living a life of excess. Consequently, life is no longer fun for Jig. When she samples a strong and dangerous liqueur to try to revive her interest in their great adventure, she says disappointedly that “everything tastes like licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited for so long, like absinthe.” Clearly, she is ready to abandon their dissipated way of life to settle down.

Evasion of Responsibility

The American seems unable to accept responsibility, for whatever reason. Rather than facing the challenges of normal life, he continually puts them off.

Climax

The climax occurs when Jig ends the conversation, saying, "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Symbols

White Elephants: From the perspective of the American, one of the hills resembling white elephants is the enlargement of the uterus that is becoming, or will soon become, evident as Jig's baby grows. A white elephant is a largely useless object that may be expensive to own and maintain, according to one of its definitions in standard dictionaries. From the perspective of Jig, one of the hills may represent the lifestyle of her and the American.

Railroad Tracks: Railroad tracks run side by side but never meet. Thus, they could symbolize the relationship of Jig and the American.

Zaragoza: The last letter of the alphabet occurs twice in the name of this city. Jig and the American may be two z’s that have reached the end of the road.

Green Side of the Station: Obviously, this represents life, the baby, a new beginning.

Arid Side of the Station: This represents dissipation and death.

Ebro River: This waterway, which originates in the Cantabrian Mountains and flows 565 miles to the Mediterranean, represents vitality, life. It can also represent the passage of time.

Anís del Toro: This represents the excitement the American offers Jig. But it fails to stir her.

Baggage: This represents the past, which is the same as the future to the American. When he picks up the suitcases and carries them to the other side of the station, he is indicating that he wants to continue as before.

Author Information

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American writer of novels and short stories. Before turning to fiction, he worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and served as a First World War ambulance driver before enlisting with the Italian infantry and suffering a wound. After the war, he worked for the Toronto Star and lived for a time in Paris and Key West, Fla.Cuba until 1958 and Idaho until 1961, the year of his death by suicide. His narratives frequently contain masculine motifs, such as bull-fighting (Death in the Afternoon), hunting (The Green Hills of Africa), war (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell During the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, he served as a newspaper correspondent, then lived in Tolls), and fishing (The Old Man and the Sea). All of these motifs derive from Hemingway’s own experiences as a traveler and an adventurer. Arguably, he was a better short-story writer than a novelist, although it was his longer works that built his reputation.

Study Questions and Essay Topics

1. Does Jig love the American? Does he love her?
2. Write an essay that takes a stand on what Jig has decided to do.
3. The following statement containing a quotation that appears in the plot summary above: When the American tells her that they can have whatever they want—“We can have the whole world”—Jig says, “It isn’t ours any more . . . And once they take it away, you never get it back.” Comment on what Jig means when she says that "once they take it away, you never get it back.”
4. Write a short psychological profile of Jig or the American.
5. Write another ending for the story that tells what Jig plans to do.

Hills Like White Elephants

By Ernest Hemingway

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this siode there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

'What should we drink?' the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

'It's pretty hot,' the man said.

'Let's drink beer.'

'Dos cervezas,' the man said into the curtain.

'Big ones?' a woman asked from the doorway.

'Yes. Two big ones.'

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

'They look like white elephants,' she said.

'I've never seen one,' the man drank his beer.

'No, you wouldn't have.'

'I might have,' the man said. 'Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything.'

The girl looked at the bead curtain. 'They've painted something on it,' she said. 'What does it say?'

'Anis del Toro. It's a drink.'

'Could we try it?'

The man called 'Listen' through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

'Four reales.' 'We want two Anis del Toro.'

'With water?'

'Do you want it with water?'

'I don't know,' the girl said. 'Is it good with water?'

'It's all right.'

'You want them with water?' asked the woman.

'Yes, with water.'

'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down.

'That's the way with everything.'

'Yes,' said the girl. 'Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'

'Oh, cut it out.'

'You started it,' the girl said. 'I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'

'Well, let's try and have a fine time.'

'All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?'

'That was bright.'

'I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?'

'I guess so.'

The girl looked across at the hills.

'They're lovely hills,' she said. 'They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.'

'Should we have another drink?'

'All right.'

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

'The beer's nice and cool,' the man said.

'It's lovely,' the girl said.

'It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all.'

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

'I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.'

The girl did not say anything.

'I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural.'

'Then what will we do afterwards?'

'We'll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.'

'What makes you think so?'

'That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy.'

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

'And you think then we'll be all right and be happy.'

'I know we will. Yon don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it.'

'So have I,' said the girl. 'And afterwards they were all so happy.'

'Well,' the man said, 'if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple.'

'And you really want to?'

'I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to.'

'And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?'

'I love you now. You know I love you.'

'I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?'

'I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry.'

'If I do it you won't ever worry?'

'I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple.'

'Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me.'

'What do you mean?'

'I don't care about me.'

'Well, I care about you.'

'Oh, yes. But I don't care about me. And I'll do it and then everything will be fine.'

'I don't want you to do it if you feel that way.'

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

'And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.'

'What did you say?'

'I said we could have everything.'

'No, we can't.'

'We can have the whole world.'

'No, we can't.'

'We can go everywhere.'

'No, we can't. It isn't ours any more.'

'It's ours.'

'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.'

'But they haven't taken it away.'

'We'll wait and see.'

'Come on back in the shade,' he said. 'You mustn't feel that way.'

'I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.'

'I don't want you to do anything that you don't want to do -'

'Nor that isn't good for me,' she said. 'I know. Could we have another beer?'

'All right. But you've got to realize - '

'I realize,' the girl said. 'Can't we maybe stop talking?'

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

'You've got to realize,' he said, ' that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.'

'Doesn't it mean anything to you? We could get along.'

'Of course it does. But I don't want anybody but you. I don't want anyone else. And I know it's perfectly simple.'

'Yes, you know it's perfectly simple.'

'It's all right for you to say that, but I do know it.'

'Would you do something for me now?'

'I'd do anything for you.'

'Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?'

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.

'But I don't want you to,' he said, 'I don't care anything about it.'

'I'll scream,' the girl siad.

The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. 'The train comes in five minutes,' she said.

'What did she say?' asked the girl.

'That the train is coming in five minutes.'

The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.

'I'd better take the bags over to the other side of the station,' the man said. She smiled at him.

'All right. Then come back and we'll finish the beer.'

He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar-room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

'Do you feel better?' he asked.

'I feel fine,' she said. 'There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.'

William Faulkner: The Faded Rose of Emily

This is a sample analysis for the story A Rose For Emily. This analysis was written by Eric Knickerbocker and was posted on March 15, 2003.

In “ A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner’s use of language foreshadows and builds up to the climax of the story. His choice of words is descriptive, tying resoundingly into the theme through which Miss Emily Grierson threads, herself emblematic of the effects of time and the nature of the old and the new. Appropriately, the story begins with death, flashes back to the near distant past and leads on to the demise of a woman and the traditions of the past she personifies. Faulkner has carefully crafted a multi-layered masterpiece, and he uses language, characterization, and chronology to move it along, a sober commentary flowing beneath on the nature of time, change, and chance—as well as a psychological narrative on the static nature of memory.

Faulker begins his tale at the end: after learning of Miss Emily’s death, we catch a glimpse of her dwelling, itself a reflection of its late owner. The house lifts “its stubborn and coquettish decay” above new traditions just as its spinster is seen to do, “an eyesore among eyesores” (Faulkner 666). The narrative voice suggests the gossipy nature of a Southern town where everyone knows everyone else, and nosy neighbors speculate about the affairs of Miss Emily, noting her often antiquated ways and her early retirement. In fact, it appears as if the town itself is describing the events of Miss Emily’s life, the first-person plural “we” a telling indication. The first explicit example of this occurrence takes place during the flashback in the second section, when, in speaking of her sweetheart, the narrator parenthetically adds “the one we believed would marry her” (667).

In the opening characterization, many descriptive words foreshadow the ultimate irony at the climatic ending: “her skeleton was small and sparse,” “she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue” (667). We learn that “her voice was dry and cold” and that she did not accept no for an answer (667). Her house, a fading photograph, “smelled of dust and disuse—a closed, dank smell,” and when her guests are seated a “faint dust” rises “sluggishly about their thighs” (667). All of these terms suggest neglect, decay, entropy: each of these elements tie in with the surface layer as well as the deeper themes upon which Faulkner tiers.

After carefully building such descriptive statements, Faulkner flashes back in time and examines the events that lead up to the moment of death. This toggling of events has been skillfully constructed, building suspense in a way that a straight forward chronology could not. The first unusual element that catches the curiosity of the reader is the mention of “the smell,” which happened “thirty years before” (667).

The smell, however, continues to persist, rapping on the reader’s curiosity for attention: What is the significance of this infernal “smell”? Faulkner chooses to tell us only enough to keep us guessing, diverting us with the four men who “slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork” with a single man forming a “regular sowing motion” with the lime in his hand (668). No sooner is this done, however, than the light comes on and Emily’s “upright torso [sits] motionless as that of an idol” (668). Here we see the first instance of this “idolatrous” description. We again are shown this image (as well as the first person plural narrator) after the mysterious smell leaves in several weeks and Emily has aged to the point of near death, her image in the window “like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which” (671). Not only does this form an interesting snapsnot, but we learn that (again note the first person plural narrator) “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door” (668). It would seem that Faulkner is trying to tell us something on another level if we will pay careful attention. Is Emily a portrait, a tableau vivant of a past that clings on in its own tenacious ways, disturbing the otherwise tranquil flow of the future? We will come back to this idea in a moment.

In describing the death of Emily’s father, Faulkner again foreshadows or alludes to the tragic ending: “She told them that her father was not dead,” and “did that for three days,” until she finally broke down and allowed him to be buried properly (669). To this end, the “town narrator” comments “We did not say she was crazy then,” hinting perhaps that “we” do say she is crazy now (669). From here, Faulker brings forth Homer Barron, a largely flat character who nonetheless plays an integral part, for it is he that supplies the cadaver so imperative to the plot. According to the collective narrator, he is “a Northerner, a day laborer,” “a big, dark, ready man,” he laughs a lot, and he curses “the niggers” (669).

In this case, Faulkner again returns to Miss Emily’s austere characterization: when she purchases the arsenic, she looks through her “cold, haughty black eyes” which peer from a “face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and the eye-sockets” (670). Just as Faulkner deftly employs Miss Emily’s haughtiness to keep important details from the reader, so too does he use her elusive habits to suggest a mysterious element that helps heighten suspense. These “haughty black eyes” effectively stare down the druggist, and for good reason, because if they did not, Faulkner would have forced Emily’s hand and ruined the suspense. Since he does not but rather allows her silence to reign supreme and enigmatic, the next day “we all said, ‘She will kill herself,’” but she doesn’t (670). The reader is further engaged, wondering where all these individual details might lead: first the smell, then the arsenic, and now it appears that she is to marry Homer Barron—if we are inclined to trust the collective narrator—though he soon disappears out of the story as another odd detail wonting further explanation (671).

Miss Emily emerges as a historical figure frozen in a sort of stasis, though throughout it all, Faulkner never makes her any less complex and ambiguous. Resistant to change though she may be, even she cannot hold back the effects of aging, growing steadily older: “the next few years” her hair “grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning” (671). This emphasis on the graying of Miss Emily and its final state of “iron-gray” is crucial to determining with surety just whose “long strand of iron-gray hair” we find in the indented pillow next to Barron’s remains at the end of the story (672). Within this exposition is again juxtaposed the concept of Miss Emily (representative of the old) versus the new: “then the newer generation became the backbone and spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from ladies’ magazines” (671). It would seem that Miss Emily, along with the China she taught children to paint, had become something of a relic herself, resistant to the demands of the younger generation.

Her Negro manservant also remains impervious to the ebb and flow of time, though the years gray his hair down just as readily, leaving him increasingly stooped and haggard (671). In fact, we watch this process happen “daily, monthly, yearly,” which seems a clear parallel to Faulkner’s interest in the role of time and the interplay of the new versus the old (671). It is here that we read Miss Emily described for the second time as “an idol in a niche,” a metaphor that would further bear out Miss Emily’s defiance in the face of a changing world that might not be able to change her habits, but nonetheless changes her as is the wont of time and entropy (671). This “idol in a niche” is the last living portrait Faulkner paints of Miss Emily before she dies (671).

It is interesting that she does not die in the fateful room, but instead is found in a room downstairs “in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped up on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight” (672). The ladies from the town come over with their “hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances,” apparently oblivious to the manservant’s stealthy exit out the back door (672). At her funeral the ladies are once again “sibilant”—snakelike?—and “macabre,” both suggestive of the final suspenseful outcome (672).

The manservant—not a particularly important character though without him the plot would have lacked an added layer of richness—has finally outlived his usefulness and Faulkner handily shuffles him off the story board, adding one last element of mystery to the tale in the process: “Why did the Negro disappear?” Faulkner realizes that the discerning reader will likely question this disappearance and total it with the mounting evidence in the series of unusual events preceding, only to catch the unwary reader off guard with the conclusion.

At the funeral, some of the very old men were “in their brushed Confederate uniforms,” suggesting something of the historical undercurrent running through Faulkner’s piece (672). Perhaps, however, the deeper meaning to Faulkner’s thoughts is found in the description of these men who have confused “time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, [and] to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years” (672). This description would seem to explain the static nature of an unchanging Miss Emily—“the carven torso of the idol in a niche” (671)—the tableau vivant framed by the “back-flung front door” (668) through which the secret might be unlocked—and the unchanging nature of the manservant. It would seem Faulkner has woven a multifaceted tapestry with its warp and woof firmly anchored to universal—and therefore timeless—truth, while his historical particulars form the aesthetic shag bedecking its surface: the changeless world of being beneath, the straining world of becoming above.

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriff's office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.

They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.

They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."

"But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?"

"I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--"

"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."

"But, Miss Emily--"

"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

II

So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.

That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket.

"Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.

"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.

"Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "

"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."

The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.

"It's simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don't. .."

"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?"

So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

III

SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- -
without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily."

She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her.

"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said.

"Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom--"

"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."

The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--"

"Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?"

"Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma'am. But what you want--"

"I want arsenic."

The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."

Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didn't come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."

IV

So THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.

Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss Emily's people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emily's coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.

Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro

He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

V

THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.

The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.

The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.

Malamud's Unmagic Barrel

This is a sample analysis for the story The Magic Barrel. This analysis was written by Gary Sloan.

Klein's proposition works better inverted: Salzman exists entirely within ordinary determinations. Everything he does is explicable in naturalistic terms. Thus approached, the story becomes more dramatic and ingenious. The "happy" ending is no longer assured in advance by elfin sorcery: celestial ingenuity yields to the human variety. Salzman's "magical powers," like the "magic" in the barrel, vanish whence they came: Finkle's "distracted globe." A naturalistic interpretation is consistent with Malamud's authorial creed: "I would never," he said in a rare interview, "deliberately flatten a character to create a stereotype. . . . Most of all I'm out to create real and passionate human beings" (Field and Field 16).(1)

The story can be profitably read along the following lines. Even before he meets Finkle, on the basis of what the student "revealed of himself in a curriculum vitae" (Malamud 195), the broker contemplates a marriage between his daughter, Stella, and the new client.(2) After he meets the student, the intention solidifies. Salzman "heartily approved of Finkle" (194) and "let out a soft, contented sigh" (195). As "commercial Cupid," Salzman hopes to do to Finkle what Eros does to the lovelorn in Medieval and Renaissance emblems: put a hood over his head (hoodwink). If his stratagem works, he will in one swoop "save" his daughter and elevate his own social status. From the outset, Salzman envisions Finkle as son-in-law, persistently calling him "rabbi" - trying the respected epithet on for size - and assuming a proprietary air. To preserve an appearance of occupational integrity and, more importantly, to buy time to sound his prey, the broker masks, consummately as it turns out, his predatory intent.

Salzman's comments about his clients disclose his hidden intent. The remarks are rife with double entendres and subtexts. His thespian skills, lavishly on parade throughout the story, are foretold: "On the mother's side comes . . . one actor" (196). Around Finkle, he is always on: he "adjusted his horn-rimmed spectacles, gently cleared his throat and read in an eager voice. . . ." He can under- as well as overact. When Finkle spurns Sophie P., as Salzman secretly wishes, the broker "hunched his shoulders in an almost imperceptible gesture of disappointment" (196). Rather than betoken wizardly locomotion, as some have thought, his sudden entrances and exits have a patented theatrical quality. His motives, too, are of ordinary provenance. Like Ruth K.'s parents, he and his wife are "particular people" (197) when it comes to a son-in-law. They are "interested in a professional man," and in his anxiety to reel Finkle in, Salzman has become, a la Ruth K.'s father, a specialist in stomach disorders (197). If the broker can land his catch, his daughter "will be thankful for the rest of her life" (196). In another passage ostensibly about Ruth K., Salzman obliquely reveals why he is playing matchmaker for his daughter. "We" may be glossed as Salzman and his wife:

He [Ruth's father] wants she should have the best, so he looks around himself When we will locate the right boy he will introduce him and encourage. This makes a better marriage than if a young girl without experience takes for herself. (198)

When a "curiously bitter" Finkle rejects Ruth K. out of hand, a sullen Salzman imagines himself father-in-law non grata.

Finally, he [Finkle] shook his head.

"Why not?" Salzman persisted, the pitch of his voice rising.

"Because I detest stomach specialists."

"So what do you care what is his business? After you marry her do you need him? Who says he must come every Friday night in your house?" (199)

To net the slippery student, Salzman must do two things: (1) insure that Finkle is disenchanted with the regular clients, and (2) correctly package Stella.

The first task is easily discharged. Destitute of magic powers, the broker has been unable to ward off the inexorable incursion of modernity. The matchmaking institution, like "the much-handled cards" (194), has become superannuated. Desirable prospects now fend for themselves. Hence, the broker is poor and ill-fed, lives in "a very old tenement house" (210), and constantly rushes, a hapless luftmensch trying to drum up business. When Finkle "remarked that the function of the marriage broker was ancient and honorable" and that his own parents, "brought together by a matchmaker," had had a successful marriage, Salzman, machinations already afoot, "listened in embarrassed surprise" (194). Finkle's respect seems to Salzman as antiquated as the institution the broker represents (Finkle later admits he does not really care for it [199]). The praise nevertheless rekindles an extinguished idealism: Salzman "experienced a glow of pride in his work, an emotion that had left him years ago" (194). Stella and Finkle are, as Salzman might say to his wife, "two fine people that they would be wonderful to be married" (207).

Even at the first meeting, Salzman gets an inkling of the guise in which Stella must eventually appear. With 25 years in the business, he readily discerns where Finkle's chief interest lies. Notwithstanding the "scholar's nose" and "ascetic lips" (195), the sheltered student seeks a decidedly sublunary love. He wants a wide field from which to choose: "So few?" he asks when he sees Salzman holding but six cards (195). His second question is, "Do you keep photographs of your clients on file?" (195). He has an eye out for someone young, fresh, and sexy, but not too intimidating.(3) Understandably, he "flushes," twice, when Salzman asks what interests him (198, 201). Sophie P., a 24-year-old widow, does not pass muster. She is damaged goods. Though he will finally agree to meet Lily H., she hasn't a chance either: she is neither young nor libidinous, and has a discomfiting idle fixe on holy men. The 19-year-old, "pretty" (or so Salzman says) Ruth K. fails to meet the exacting specifications because "she is a little lame on the right foot" (198). Finkle wants a perfect ten.

Finkle's finicky standards constitute a daunting challenge for the matchmaker. Bruised, not beautified by poverty (208), Stella's only kinship with Cinderella is the phonic one. Finkle needs a jolt - lest, caught, he prove not worth the catching. The proximate agent of shock will be Lily Hirschorn, votary (as Salzman well knows) of the caricaturally devout. Primed for her "man enamored of God" (203), a "semi-mystical Wonder Rabbi" (206), Lily will function as gadfly, albeit an unwitting one. Her balked expectations, Salzman hopes, will induce in Finkle a guilty conscience. Rightly plumbed, he might lower his standards a bit.

At his second meeting with Finkle, Salzman again shows no trace of shamanic disposition. His anxiety is unfeigned. He is an all-too-mortal schemer in extremis. "His face was gray and meager, his expression hungry, and he looked as if he would expire on his feet." His histrionic faculty taxed, he manages, "by some trick of the muscles, to display a broad smile" (199). By upping the ante - Lily is not only wealthy, stylish, and cultivated, he tells Finkle, but, like him, partikiler (202) - Salzman at last mediates a rendezvous.

When he next sees Finkle, a week later and subsequent to the rendezvous, the harried broker is "a skeleton with haunted eyes" (206). Again, he shows not a sign of sorcerous clairvoyance. He is painfully ignorant of the status of his gambit. He stalwartly feigns a nonchalant attitude:

Casually coughing, Salzman came immediately to the point: how did you like her?"

Leo's anger rose and he could not refrain from chiding, the matchmaker: "Why did you lie to me, Salzman?"

Salzman's pale face went dead white, the world had snowed on him. (206)

For a perilous moment, Salzman thinks he has been hoisted on his own petard, hence the apoplectic reaction. When he realizes Finkle is alluding to Lily, not Stella, he reclaims his histrionic flair and, with glib avowals of innocence, smoothly parries the accusations. Finkle is still son-in-law designate: "The marriage broker fastened hungry eyes on him" (207). Since Finkle "is no longer interested in an arranged marriage" (207), Salzman must pin his hopes on the cheap snapshot of Stella. In a field of wilting lilies, Stella may flourish.

When, unable to fend for himself, Finkle turns in last resort to the pictures the broker has left, he sees women "all past their prime, all starved behind bright smiles, not a true personality in the lot. Life, despite their yoohooings, had passed them by" (208). In them, perhaps, he glimpses his own future. Then, he beholds Stella, vibrant youth in a moribund gallery. In his glandular, revved-up imagination, she smacks of earthy sensuality and forbidden fruit - owing in part, one surmises, to a lascivious mien coached by her father. Finkle "received an impression, somehow of evil" (209) - in the original version, "filth" (Dessner, "Revisions" 259).(4) Later, like Jehovah marveling at his own creation, "he examined the face and found it good." She alone "could understand him and help him seek whatever he was seeking" (209). What he seeks is sexual gratification, but he remains, consciously at least, ignorant of the need. In this respect, Salzman (as well as the reader) is well ahead of him.

When Finkle, via Mrs. Salzman, summons the marriage broker, Salzman has long been on tenterhooks, the outcome of his ploy in limbo. Adrenalin pumping, he arrives breathless, having, he says, "rushed" (211). When Finkle flashes the snapshot of Stella and ejaculates, "Here is the one I want" (211), Salzman puts on, as one might say, a stellar performance: he "slipped on his glasses and took the picture into his trembling hand. He turned ghastly and let out a groan" (211-12). Knowing that Finkle bridles at the hard sale, Salzman now refuses to sell. The scene is unabashed burlesque, even to a chase and a hysterical woman, with Salzman now the masterful human impresario. Slow on the uptake, Finkle does not immediately grasp that Stella is (supposed to be) a sexual dynamo. Salzman's metaphorical inventiveness is sorely tasked:

"She is not for you. She is a wild one - wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi."

"What do you mean wild?"

"Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. This is why to me she is dead now."

"In God's name, what do you mean?"

"Her I can't introduce to you," Salzman cried.

"Why are you so excited?"

"Why, he asks," Salzman said, bursting into tears. "This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell." (212)

Salzman is excited because his ploy is working. He has wrapped Stella in the perfect garb. In Finkle's subconscious, the unholy litany of "sin," "hell," "wild," and "animal" reverberates with aphrodisiac potency. With her "impression of youth" and "spring flowers" (208), Stella embodies, or so Finkle thinks, his oxymoronic dream girl: the perpetually virginal painted woman. Later, when he sees her under the street lamp, he imagines "in a troubled moment" she has on a red dress instead of a white one. Consciously, he has adopted the role of savior. An unabashed slut might be hard "to convert . . . to goodness" (213). The virginal white assuages his austere conscience.

From start to finish, the story is firmly situated on the rock of human passion, foible, and aspiration. Salzman's lot is not without pathos. By contrast, Malamud's treatment of Finkle is unremittingly comic.(5) Finkle's condition is throughout reminiscent of Byron's pubescent Don Juan, befuddled by his sexual awakening: "Now we'll turn to Juan. / Poor little fellow! he had no idea / Of his own case, and never hit the true one" (Don Juan, Canto the First, stanza 86).

The narrator's diction is occasionally impish: Finkle watches "with half open mouth" as the moon "penetrates" a hen-like cloud before dropping out like an egg (195). The student is at last "aroused" by fantasies of Lily H. and walks "erectly" to meet her, discreetly, however, resisting the urge to "use" his phallic walking stick (202). Later, he solemnly tells Salzman: "I am no longer interested in an arranged marriage. To be frank, I now admit the necessity of premarital love." Embarrassed by the Freudian slip - the euphemism for premarital sex - he quickly emends: "That is, I want to be in love with the one I marry" (207). The last we see of Finkle he is rushing toward Stella with flowers "outthrust" (214). The climactically placed verb could hardly be better.

For some readers, Stella is even more problematic than her father. Lionel Trilling remarked that one need not believe "Stella is what her father makes her out to be - possibly her sexual life is marked merely by a freedom of the kind that now morality scarcely reproves" (173). Actually, one need not suppose Stella has any sexual experience at all. In the final vignette, her eyes are full of "desperate innocence," and she awaits Finkle "uneasily" and "shyly." The cigarette and red pumps can be glossed as her thespian father's contributions, part of the packaging. This might be Stella's first date.

In the final, often discussed sentence, Salzman, concealed chaperone, "chanted prayers for the dead." The dead are Stella Salzman and Leo Finkle.(6) The tone is ambivalent. Though pleased to have landed his "professional man," Salzman knows that marriage can be lethal to romantic illusions. Earlier, when Finkle opines that Ruth K. "believes in love," Salzman can barely suppress a guffaw (198). Finkle's "love," he long ago deduced, is Iago's "sect or scion of lust." Knowing marriage demands sterner stuff, Salzman, pious Jew, naturally seeks the aid of higher powers, having none of his own.

1 Asked whether he read criticism of his own works, Malamud replied: "I like imaginative interpretations of my books, whether I agree with them or not. I enjoy criticism that views the work in ways I haven't anticipated - that surprises me" (15).

2 While several readers echo Finkle's suspicion that Salzman "planned it all to happen that way" (213), they believe the plan begins only with The placement of Stella's picture in the envelope. A few believe it begins earlier, but they adduce the fact as further evidence of Salzman's supernatural powers of ordination (See Storey 180; May 95-96; Ochshorn 61-62). Finkle's suspicion may be Malamud's way of alerting readers to his own narrative strategy.

3 Storey, May, and Dessner ("Playfulness") have all commented on the sexual dimension. It seems to me they do not go far enough.

4 The story was first published in 1954 in The Partisan Review and later revised for the 1958 collection The Magic Barrel. In "Revisions," Dessner lists all the differences, most of them minor, between the versions.

5 In the course of the story, Finkle does not learn as much about himself as he thinks. Even as he chides himself for egoism, he wants love to "come to him" (206), Stella to "help him," to find in her "his own redemption" (209, 214; italics added). When Finkle plumes himself on his new self-awareness, the narrative voice is distantly wry, the mode comic: "Never in the Five Books and all the Commentaries - mea culpa - had the truth been revealed to him. . . . [H]e drew the consolation that he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered" (205). "Perhaps with this new knowledge of himself he would be more successful than in the past" (206). He "had grown a pointed beard and his eyes were weighted with wisdom" (213). After Salzman scandalizes Stella, the treatment of Finkle is pure slapstick:

Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers. Under the covers he thought his life through. Although he soon fell asleep he could not sleep her out of his mind. He woke, beating his breast. Though he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly struggled not to love her; fearing success, he escaped it. (213)

6 Salzman's previous application of the word to Stella ("to me she is dead now") has been often noted. The word is also applied earlier to Finkle. The devout image Lily has of him has "no relation," the narrator reports, "to the living or dead" Finkle (204).