First-Person Fiction

I think the narrator of this story was obviously looking for love and validation, but I’m not sure if she found it by the end. My initial reaction to the ending of the story was that she found love with the magician because he accepted her. However, I think of the title of the story. Perhaps the magician was simply filling in as a quick form of validation that the narrator hadn’t gotten for years. Part of me wants to think that she did love this person, but I’m not so sure. She seemed desperate for love and affection. I think that there were elements of love found with Gigi and Lao Ting, but when Lao Ting was presumed dead, she felt hopeless and eventually became suicidal. This story ties into many others in this collection because of its themes of love, loneliness, and depression.

The narrative of this story gets set in motion when the narrator is offered a job position as a “surrogate vice president” of a company called Value Enterprise Association, run by Tao Ling and Gigi, the operations manager. The job position is one that allows the narrator to be the face of the company, regardless of any knowledge about what the company actually does in the first place. I found it interesting that the type of company Tao Ling ran was never explicitly mentioned throughout the entire narrative, and all the readers were given to go on was that the company needed someone to be the spokesperson in order to convince American businessmen that they should enter contracts with this company. This job opportunity given to the narrator gives her reason to tell this story, especially in comparison to the job she previously had, taking reservation calls for Marriott hotels. The significant upgrade in her salary and improvement of her living situation were cause for her to believe that she had an important story to tell. I do not think that the narrator necessarily has an audience in mind when telling this story, but I do think she could be writing down or recording her memories of this job in a journal or diary of some kind. This is because she never addresses an audience directly.

The narrator’s perspective on the events that take place in this story are such that she is looking back in the past to tell the story of how she ended up in Vacaville with the magician her work friend Robbie had recommended to her. We discover what perspective she is writing this series of events from at the very end of the story, when she states, “So I moved here to Vacaville to be with him. It is good to have someone to turn to late at night, when the voices in my head are loud and there are no drugs to dull them” (pg 261). The narrator believes that this story is about her, and particularly her new job, her medical condition, and how she came to meet the magician. I think that this story is more about the standard of beauty the narrator thinks she has to live up to, and how outward appearances can be very different than how the narrator feels about herself and the medical condition she has to deal with every day. I would think that the narrator is mistaken as to the purpose of this story, because although it is important to document her experiences, this story serves as more of a representation of the standards of beauty that everyone feels pressure to live up to, and what that can do to an individual emotionally, psychologically, and otherwise. I thought it was interesting that the narrator decided to go live with the magician instead of visiting a licensed doctor for her medical condition, especially if she had as much money as she said she was making from her job with Tao Ling. When her treatments do not seem to make a difference, it makes sense that she would decide to turn to alternative medicine instead. I think the narrator misunderstands that physical perfection is not the standard one should live their lives according to, and that everyone has their flaws whether they show them outwardly or not. I also think that telling this story is a way for the narrator to get her innermost thoughts and insecurities out in the open. Overall, this story provides a very interesting insight into how people can allow their imperfections to change the course of their lives, and the effects that this can have on their mental health.

The narrator in “The Surrogate” is a lonely, insecure person who is in pain all the time from a medical condition. To make herself more noticeable, she agrees to be the surrogate vice president of a company run by a man named Lao Ting. Her job was to basically pose and get American businessmen to sign papers and negotiate in favor of the business. By using her sex appeal and wearing a dress suited for business, she would be more likely to get American businessmen to cooperate rather than if Lao Ting did the negotiations himself. Not only does she go to the business meetings, but she also tends to hang around Lao Ting’s family where Lao Ting and his wife, Gigi, treat her like one of their own children. She revels in the attention that is given to her and she can temporarily forget her insecurities.

On the weekends, she likes to go out to the clubs to meet men and show off her body, but not having sex. However, she is insecure about her body, hence why she tapes pennies on her nipples and taping a photo of Charlie Chaplin to her pubis (hip bone). When looking up Charlie Chaplin on the internet you come across the character of the Tramp who is described as someone who tries to act like a gentleman despite social status. In a way, this could be the narrator’s way of flaunting to the men she meets that she makes more money than they do and that they are only worthy of seeing her body, not having sex with her.

Towards the end of the story, Lao Ting dies from a swimming accident, and her world is turned upside down. She can no longer work for the company as a surrogate so she is let go. She goes on about her life in misery, taking hormone medication to try and help her medical condition. She reaches her breaking point and feels suicidal so she calls up a magic man that one of her former colleagues gave her the number to. She ends up living with him, even though he cannot cure her because he accepts her and all her flaws. The narrator knows she has good looks but she is extremely lonely and wants any kind of validation she can get that she is pretty and enough for someone.

This story seemed to be a love story in a way. The narrator probably didn’t realize it, but I think he needed a better mother figure in his life and this came about through Mrs. Honigbaum. Their relationship was something he needed in order to feel valid. He didn’t see that much success within his acting career, but he was successful in finding someone who cared for him. I think that his mother definitely cared for him, but not in the way that he wanted. I think he craved a more tender love. The narrator of this story definitely transformed by the end in my opinion. He was very arrogant and was probably still that way by the end, but I think he came to accept his loneliness and how it seemed to be resolved through Mrs. Honigbaum.

The narrator of this short story was a naïve guy living in LA hoping to make something of himself as an actor and “Nothing Ever Happens Here” is a collection of acting mishaps, some flashbacks to whenever he was living at home with his mother, but mostly it was his interactions with his landlady, Mrs. Honigbaum. The strained relationship with his mother kept coming up throughout the story, partially because of the narrator’s own apprehension from him ignoring her, and partially because Mrs. Honigbaum brought her up a decent bit. This may have been her projecting how much she wished she could have said, but she was also an extremely pragmatic character with a strong sense of duty. Her job was fluff that people read to feel better, being casted in anything required some level of being superficial, and things were the way they were.

The narrator was clearly green to the way a lot of things worked out there, but he was one of the few guy narrator’s who wasn’t completely repulsive. Other than lying some and being a little self-entitled he really just minded his own business for the most part. The thing that I found ironic was that his life in LA sounded almost more formulaic than the life that he was living at home. Mainly, I think that he wanted to 1) get away from his mother 2) to prove her wrong. I’m not sure if acting really was his passion more than making something of himself was. In the one interaction he had with his mom where she essentially said that he would be a small fish in a big pond and that there were hundreds of thousands of guys with the same aspirations I think summed up the situation the best. He just wanted her support, or some sort of enthusiasm for the notion (at least at the time) rather than to be torn down another peg. Maybe that’s why this story was being told, in an attempt to show his mother that things were different, but he couldn’t see how much really hasn’t changed.

The narrators of both these stories are, quite bluntly, complete idiots. It is surprising that both of them admit to it at the end of each story. We’ve read in Ottessa’s previous stories of the idiocy of several of her characters, but none of them ever admitted to it. The two male characters in these stories take a different path, hence the reason they are telling us.

Ottessa Moshfegh

While these two characters are of different ages—eighteen and thirty-three—during the events of the stories, they share several character traits, one of them being a ridiculous imagination. They both live for the flimsy, false images inside their heads. The first narrator moves to Los Angeles in hopes of being a successful actor, not out of any real desire to be an actor, but because he is enamored of the lifestyle; he admits to us he can’t act. He says “I didn’t particularly like movies. It seemed like hard work to act in something that went on for so long. I thought I could move to Hollywood and get a role on a show like Eight Is Enough as the cool older brother. And later I could be like Starsky on Starsky and Hutch.” He is clearly overlooking the fact that being on a television show requires far more time than a movie. He tells us later that “I was bold. I was courageous. I was exceptional. I had big dreams…One day I’d be escorted through the streets in a motorcade, and the entire world would know my name.” And yet, to be famous and rich are not the reasons why he is pursuing this path. He wants to break the cycle in his family and the small-town life in which he had been raised. “My mother had no idea what real ambition was,” he says. “Her father was a janitor. Her father’s father had been a farmer. Her mother’s father had been a pastor at the prison. I would be the first in a succession of losers to make something of myself.” He has no real ambition himself; he simply wants to be first male in his family to have something other than a small-town, menial job. His move to Los Angeles is based on nothing more than a thought. In the end he tells us that “each night before I fell asleep, [Mrs. Honigbaum] recited some prayers in Hebrew and put her hands on my face and shoulders. Whatever spells she cast, they didn’t work. Neither of us was very surprised.” We can infer from these last sentences that he never made it big in Los Angeles and he returned home to Utah. He most likely works in the prison and is married to one of the girls from his high school, and it is from this perspective that he is telling the story.

The second narrator’s stupidity propels us along right from the opening paragraph. He meets a woman in a furniture store and “her face was pinched, as though she’d just smelled someone farting. It was that look of revulsion that awoke something in me. She made me want to be a better man.” He later tells us that “I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself.” He is no longer interested in any other woman, nor is he affected by them. He only wants Britt, a woman who couldn’t be less interested in him and sees him as a client. His fabrication of wanting an ottoman refurbished only serves to highlight his idiocy. “I understood that I’d be deceiving Britt Wendt by claiming ownership of this ottoman,” he says, “but I reasoned that as soon as she fell in love with me—perhaps she already had—the existence of the furniture or lofts, any trite reality, would become laughably irrelevant.” He imagines their life together of eating, drinking, and sex. When she does reply to his previous email with her own grammatically incorrect one, he rushes off to buy the ottoman from a teenage boy. He gives up, for the most part, all of his clothes and all of his money for this ratty piece of furniture. And because in his haste he left his floor heater on, he burns down the apartment complex. The last sentence is when he admits his stupidity: “I didn’t start the fire,’ I said, like the dumb man I’d become. ‘This is an act of God.” The narrator tells us this story years later—the time progression is unknown. He understands that he was a broke, drunk, horny man who was only attracted to Britt for the imagined amazing sex. And yet there are questions that need to be answered: Why was a look of revulsion what attracted him to Britt? Why was he so lonely? Why did he want to be “murdered” by either Britt or the woman from Iga, the Polish bar? Given our understanding of the nature of Ottessa’s characters, this narrator doesn’t have the answers.

We have read of many ugly characters in Ottessa’s collection, but the narrator of this story takes that ugliness one step further. We have a clear understanding of the narrator’s character—she feels herself to be superior to the residents in Alna, and she hates her current work life. She also craves the drugs or “my little jewel” as she refers to them. She is answerable to no one, and has no interest in caring about others. What events or circumstances molded this personality of our narrator, we can only speculate, but this antipathy towards others leads the narrator to a despicable inaction.

Ottessa Moshfegh

The narrator returns to her home to find a teenager standing on her lawn looking at her house. She tells us “when the girl turned around, I saw that she was pregnant. The swell of her baby made a tent of her long black sleeveless shirt.” The girl is looking for work, and she wants to clean the house as she had done before. Does the narrator refuse her because of her condition? No. Does she offer to help in any way? No. She simply lets the girl clean the house. The narrator does wonder about the teenager and even asks herself how the girl’s mother could let her “wander outside in the sweltering heat.” But the narrator, in her determinedness to be uncaring, does nothing for the girl.

The narrator simply eats and watches the teenager lug the cleaning supplies upstairs, “one arm weighed down by the bucket, the other dragging a broom behind her. ‘I’ll start upstairs,’ she said and lugged the stuff up the steps, her face flat and serious, the enormous bulge of her belly straining against her shirt, which was already darkened with sweat down the front.” The narrator then turns to the drugs she acquired earlier in the day, hoping to ingest them, but she realizes they’re different than the ones she had gotten before. As she stares at them wondering how she can take them, she hears “a loud thud” from upstairs. The narrator “put the stuff down on the table and listened. ‘You okay?’ I hollered, still staring down at the crystals. ‘Yeah, I’m all right,’ the girl answered. The scrub brush started up again slowly.” Knowing the girl’s condition, does the narrator go upstairs to check on her? No. She doesn’t even look away from her drugs.

When the girl descends the stairs, the narrator notices “a black stain of blood at her crotch. She seemed not to know that she was bleeding. There was no way she could have seen the blood past the mountain of her belly, I suppose.” The girl becomes dizzy and is clearly in distress, and though the narrator brings her a glass of water, she still lets the girl clean the rest of the house. She doesn’t mention the blood because she “wasn’t good around blood” and “the girl seemed perfectly fine to me.” The narrator goes outside to throw away trash when the girl walks outside with “one hand down under belly and the palm of her other hand up in front of her face. When she saw me and the neighbors, she turned her palm around. It was covered in blood.” The neighbors crowd around her and call for help; the girl is in labor. The narrator simply goes inside to get the girl her money for the cleaning job.

The narrator’s self-absorbed nature and aversion to care may lead to the girl losing her life and/or the life of the child. The narrator may cause the deaths of two people because of her inaction. Whatever events led to the ugliness of the narrator, she has done nothing to rise above them. This girl could have been her chance to gain a new perspective. The girl clearly has no one except for her mother (debatable), and if the narrator had shown care, she could have gone with the girl and been present with her. However, the narrator is not inclined to change. Ottessa understands that misery loves company, and if the narrator’s ugliness affects an innocent person, so be it.

“Dancing in the Moonlight” was a story about a man, Nick, going through the holidays in the name of love and resulting with less than he started in love and material items. Nick told this story, likely out of many reasons, but I think the most prevalent may be guilt since it was very likely that he was the one who left the heater running which burned the entire apartment building down. To me, it seemed as though the narrator was thinking or writing the events as he described the events that took place. Maybe, he found telling this story as a sense of reasoning to God or something higher that he can reach to but never grasp, that is the only audience I can think of. It seemed that about half way through the story, we learned that Nick was telling this story years later, which occurs on page 229 as it said, “In a few years she’d get her eggs frozen, I predicted correctly,” and I think it may be a few years after Lacey had her eggs frozen that he told this story. I think the narrator believed this is a story about himself and his quest for love concerning Britt Wendt, but the narrator seemed completely erratic particularly with his notion of love. He thought the story was about his quite amazing quest to win Britt Wendt over, and that was if she hadn’t already fallen for him, then the turn of events that led him possibly homeless. This story seemed to me to be more about jealousy, particularly toward the neighbors on the other side of the gypsum (they’re lovers and easily heard), pity as with the drinking problems, love problems, family and friend troubles, and finally a rather psychotic seeming concept of love (so much so, he declared on page 220, two pages into the story, “I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself.”) He, most certainly, had misunderstood the relationship between him and Britt Wendt. He thought she loved him already, wanted to be in a relationship with him, and almost idolized him like many people idolize and worship God. She likely didn’t recall his name even after his email. He also didn’t understand the woman who poured him drinks and held a staring contest; he had been drunk, but he still, even after all the ideas of Britt in his head and the sudden inability to perceive another woman as worthy, tried to kiss her (she did not let him). Along with guilt and jealousy, I think the story was told in a self defense; I say this because I think he is the reason the building burned, despite he told his neighbors it’s an act of God and not him, I’m sure he lied. So, I think he felt guilty about it, but told the entire story as a defense — that it isn’t his fault.

This story was written about a man that lost his wife and chose to work in a place for adults with disabilities. He seemed to want to tell this story as a confession about how he saw his wife. He talks about how he didn’t miss her when she died and how he felt better that all her things were gone from the house. As if he only wants to remember his memories of her but nothing physical. Maybe this is because his wife was so materialistic that it had made him sick, just like it did at the end of the story when Paul was being materialistic on his birthday. The man doesn’t change throughout the story, but he talks about how his life changed in the past. He talks about how the people in the adult facility were different in how they acted, but he was different and weird too. He said he would rather be around disabled people than other human beings. I think the meaning of the story that the writer is trying to give us would be that everyone has a different place they fit in at. The man fits in best around disabled people because he isn’t liked by other people. He is a hero or a friend to his patients, but in the normal world he is alone.

From reading the story, one can tell that the narrator, Larry, is lonely. He takes up work at an adult residential facility for adults with moderate developmental disabilities. This way, he can be around people and feel like an important and superior person. He lives alone and has not dated anyone since his wife died. His daughter had already moved out and taken a bunch of her mom’s stuff with her. All he has left are the three grown men he supervises, an employee named Marsha who he is not romantically involved because she’s married, and a bunch of succulent plants.

What is interesting about Larry is that he says that he never really loved his wife or his daughter. Throughout the flashbacks of back when they were a family, Larry never did much to show his wife appreciation. He was more of an absent figure. This is seen on page 97 when his wife pulls out a gift under her seat cushion and tells Larry how much she appreciates the gift he got her, even though she bought it for herself. He never explicitly says it out loud but it hurt him whenever she would do that. When his wife died from a heart attack, it made him realize how much he did not love her. In a way, he wishes things could have been better with his wife and daughter, but also he regrets the life he chose. By choosing to work at the residential facility and growing succulents, he is trying to reconcile with his past and spend the rest of his life making up for what had happened. He knows it is futile but he will keep trying to make things right by being there for the three grown men he hangs out with and the succulent plants.

There is a lot more to this story than there may seem at first glance, and I really enjoyed the small complexities that could be found within if you looked at it a bit closer than face value. The narrator believes that this story is merely her recollection of the things she enjoys about the small, poor town of Alna, but I think this story is more about the life that the narrator missed out on or could have had, and her secret jealousy of the lives of those that have been more successful than she has. Although I think that the narrator believes that the town of Alna has its perks, she likes it mostly because compared to the people there and the zombies that sell her drugs, she is a much more successful person. The narrator expresses her desire to be a better teacher, stating “Each time seniors had me sign their yearbooks, I wrote, “Good luck!” then stared off into space, thinking of all the wisdom I could impart but didn’t” (pg 119). I think that this sentence summarizes the majority of this story, because there are multiple occasions where the narrator thinks there was more they could have done, but they decided against acting. The main instance when this happens is when the pregnant teenager is bleeding and the narrator acts as though nothing has happened until there is a medical emergency. The negligence towards others in need the narrator exhibits many times over demonstrates a massive character flaw in the narrator, which I think may be due to the fact that she seems to be rebelling against her family by withdrawing from them and society as a whole. The narrators’ perspective in this story is many years after her first summer in Alna, when she moved into her summer home and first met Clark. We learn this near the beginning of the story, as she describes all the work that Clark has done on the house during previous summers. Although what has set this narrative in motion in the first place is a much more difficult question to answer, I believe that the narrator thinks they have a story to tell by recounting their habits in their own little town where they feel as though they are on top. The narrator also mentions that they think they are dying, and telling their story would be the perfect way to describe to a younger audience what happens when you make the choices this narrator did. I sensed a bit of regret in this story, but it wasn’t very strong throughout the narrative. This leads readers to believe that although the narrator thinks that their life isn’t what they wanted it to be originally, it is still better than the majority of people’s lives in Alna. The narrator masks their own regrets by pointing out the harsh flaws in other characters, such as the old women at the garage sale. However, even though the narrator in this story is very callous and has some regrets about the course of their life, their stubbornness prevents them from changing. 

Ottessa Moshfegh dose a brilliant job of combining both repulsion and intrigue through her character development. In this short story she seems to capture the apparition of a mans true innermost nature.The main character, and our narrator, seems to have an overzealous ego as he practically drowns the text in his own self worship.He uses words such as “refined” and “wonderful” to describe his own social standing while putting down the other people in his life.You very quickly find out that these self righteous parables he seems to go on about are nothing but true as he begins to disclose facts about his earlier life and his desires.These consisting of sleeping with his friends girlfriend, breaking into peoples houses as a child and violating their privacy, longing for a primitive “wonton” sexual interaction, and eventually cheating on his wife through an act of sodomy.
You are given a man who is self depicted as elegant and moralistically inclined but as he opens up his inner most thoughts you see the unreliability of the narrators own self image. His thoughts show his own self hated longing for unethical and even “fitly” acts as he calls them. He deplores other people, like his brother MJ, who are free to be disgusting as there is no stress or fear of judgment from others while you are in MJ’s position. He longs to enjoy the primal aspects of life and craves to be disgusted by his actions but is held back by the condemnation of others. In one part he thinks of his son as he is crying over his[the narrator] grave and how his son would tell his grandchildren awful things regarding him. He loathes the idea of being hated as he is a “wonderful” man who is deserving of praise. Despite this deep drive for a clean slated life he craves to be free, to be dirty in the way that others get to be. Even in his thoughts while he is being sodomized he says, “it wasn’t painful, nor was it terrifying, but it was disgusting — just as I’d always hoped it to be.”

Much like most of the other narrators for these stories, the narrator of this one has a dry and judgmental personality. There’s this certain hyperfixation that he has with playing roles or noticing the roles that the people around him had. There’s his brother, MJ, being the “man’s man.” Then there’s him being “refined” as he self-ascribes; it doesn’t take a lot to see the arrogance that Charles has about himself, and describing yourself as refined is one of the most pretentious things that I can imagine. Regardless, it’s just ironic, because there’s hardly one thing that you would imagine a refined and successful man would stereotypically do that he does in the short story. He smokes, he drinks, he sleeps with the girl who shows up despite being a married man, etc. He undoubtedly has a warped perception of life, the fact that his relationship with his wife is so easily ignored hardly bothers him, and even in his reflections about his future are morbid at best. I also think that it’s ironic considering a lot of the delinquent activities that he did with his brother as kids, such as breaking into houses and stealing things, he participated in. So why did he and his brother go down such different paths? Other than getting into that private school and maybe some different parenting, they don’t seem much different from the descriptions Charles gives to us.

He seems to already know what life has in store for him, and it’s nothing good. His own son being frustrated with him, his grandkids “not worshipping me,” and him whining about the “sacrifices” that he’s made. It’s all so repetitive, not that that’s a gripe against the story; it was interesting. It’s hard to say that I enjoyed it because the narrator was so infuriating, and because those self-entitled characters who always thinks that the world owes them favors due to their own miserable existential dread and lack of character are irritating.

This short story follows a self-destructive woman who teaches math at a Catholic school despite the fact that she a) doesn’t really know math well enough to teach it and b) has to doctor the answers on the tests her students hand in to hide her failures in teaching and keep herself employed. She holds on to her ex even though he’s long since moved on after their divorce and calls him at all hours of the night while she’s drunk. On the topic of her drinking, she does so excessively, occasionally does drugs with her equally as destructive friend, and has sex with random people without asking about prior health history or when their last STD tests was. To top it off, rather than seeking therapy for her various issues, she laments to her students regularly and for longer than necessary, thus failing to teach them properly and needing to doctor records. Throughout the story, we watch as she barely manages to stumble through life and maintain some semblance of a routine.

The only time we see her attempt to actually better herself is when her Ex-husband asks to meet up with her. This is a turning point in her story, and from the information we’re given, we can assume she’s doing everything to appear like she, too, has moved on from the relationship. (Of course, in order to do so, we must ignore the fact she frequently drunk calls her ex, but she seems to do so, so we’re given the hint to do the same.) This is her turning point because based off her prior history of calling and lamenting to her ex, we can assume part of her hoped that the ex would want to have one last fling and possibly rekindle their relationship.

This woman is incredibly lonely and doesn’t even realize it until the end when she imagines a Priest acting fondly toward her when she attempts to leave her job. She always notices friends or families or groups of people when she’s in public and, near the end, notes almost sadly how none of the men she brought home “lasted more than a few hours” as if she were hoping one of them would want to after seeing how she lived. She wanted to leave her job after getting cut off by her ex because it hurt her more than she was willing to say, or possibly more than she realized herself. Her ex was one person she saw as a constant in her life since they spent the most time together when they were a couple, and besides her job, she never really had much else to hold on to. This is another behavior of the self destructive: this one bad thing happened, so I might as well wreck everything else.

Her decision to stay at the school was the one thing that shows that this character still has the potential to grow. If she really wanted to leave, she would have left the letter in the box and carry on, waiting for the final check to come in the mail or for the concerned emails/letters to come through asking if she’s sure about her decision. Instead, she carries the letter with her and tears it up to continue moving forward. She doesn’t say it, nor do I think she realizes it, but this character not only made the decision to stay at her job, but also stay with people since without them, she really won’t have anything to hold onto or maintain herself for, you know, despite barely being able to. And either way, how she takes care of herself during school days is still better than how she took care of herself after getting rejected. She needs the stability and the contact and she doesn’t take it away from herself.

The narrator in this story by Edward P. Jones believes that he has a story to tell when his mother, Aunt Penny, and Miss Agatha come to visit him to ask that he investigate the murder of Miss Agatha’s son, Ike. The first two sentences of this story set this whole narrative in motion and provides insight into the intentions of the narrator to leave Washington, his previous service in the Korean War, and pulls reader into an inevitable murder mystery. It is obvious from the beginning of the narration that the main character has gone through quite a lot of traumatic events, but none of them so scarring to him as the death of the white woman at the train station, despite all his time in the Korean War. I think the narrator does imagine having an audience to tell his story to, because he is a very self-centered individual that internalizes everything that happens to him on an extreme level. When they are telling this story, the narrator is recounting these events as though they happened a long time ago, and he has since moved on from this memory. We discover the narrators’ perspective right at the beginning of the story, but some aspects of his character are not evident until we observe his interactions with other characters in the story. These characters are all particularly women, and the way the narrator treats them demonstrates how he has no concept of women with multi-faceted lifestyles and personalities, capable of complex thoughts and emotions. He is thoroughly lacking in knowledge in this area, which leads the duration of this investigation of Ike’s death to take many weeks longer than it should have. Upon first meeting with the three women that came to ask for his help, he says, “My mother came around me. I knew she had been behind me, taking the measure of me and the room, finding something that she could use against me” (pg 3). This sentence clashes with the situation that actually unfolded, which demonstrates how unreliable the narrator is in this story. He does not understand women and their thoughts or feelings at all, and if he had then this murder case would have been solved in a few short days.

There is a big difference between what the narrator thinks the story is about, and what the story is about in actuality. The narrator believes that the story is about his desire to get to Alaska and start a new life, and how his plans got quashed by this murder mystery. The narrator believes that this story is also entirely about himself, and he does not view any other female character in the story as relevant unless they are somehow connected to him. I think the story is actually a demonstration of how narrow-minded the narrator truly is, and is more about his realization that there is a lot more than meets the eye with everyone he comes into contact with. This is a revelation story for the narrator, and by solving this case his eyes are opened into a broader perspective than he had at the beginning of the story. This is very unique to this story, because in many other stories that have been read throughout the course of this class, the narrator believes that they have had a revelation but in actuality they are still no better off than they started out. However, in this case the narrator has begun to change for the better at least a little bit, and readers get to witness his realizations. Before this happens though, the narrator is thrown into some situations that are hard for him to understand. Over and over again throughout this narration, the main character constantly is changing his plans to try to avoid Sheila Larkin, his ex-girlfriend. He goes out of his way to do something differently to stay away from her because he believes that she is super upset with him for breaking ties with her, and will want to beat him up. He says, “Afraid I would see Sheila Larkin, I took the long way- down Fourth Street, then along New York Avenue to Sixth Street. Afraid of lye in my face. I felt bad about her, but she wasn’t in my future” (pg 9). The narrator is so thoroughly convinced that Sheila hasn’t moved on that he is terrified of the consequences of his own actions towards her. However, when faced with Sheila and her friend passing by him on the street he feels like a ghost, because she didn’t even give him a second glance as they walked by. This is what I think started the revelation in our narrator, and solving the murder case solidified it even further. It would have been impossible for him to come to any conclusion about who killed Ike if he hadn’t been able to open his mind up at least a little bit to the possibility that there was more to Alona, her child, and their situation than the child being an annoyance and Alona just there to hold the baby. In the end, the narrator comes to realize that there are actually other people with complex, complicated lives in the world besides himself. This story serves as a valuable memory for the narrator, and his retelling of these events brings to light many important points on his perspective through it all.

This book by Kazuo Ishiguro is a fascinating read, mainly due to its portrayal of deep and complex emotion through a narrator that has no clue how to begin to comprehend such ideas. Stevens, a butler who has served at the Darlington Estate for many years, is writing this book as a sort of diary or journal of his trip to visit Miss Kenton after many years of rarely ever leaving the grounds he tended to. The overall structure of this journaling style of writing that Stevens presents us with gives us insight into the vast differences between his thoughts, feelings, and actions. There is an overarching theme of suppression throughout this book, making Stevens seem more like a hollow, inhuman narrator whose own feelings are completely foreign to him. It appears as though these behaviors he exhibits are the result of a lack of compassion from his Father, and years of upbringing that require Stevens to strive to be a ‘great’ butler. However, the definition of a truly ‘great’ butler is one that has sparked much debate among butlers in this narrative, so it would seem that Stevens has ingrained in his own head what a great butler must do based upon how his Father acted during his service as a butler. Stevens states, “This whole question is very akin to the question that has caused much debate in our profession over the years: what is a ‘great’ butler? I can recall many hours of enjoyable discussion on this topic around the fire of the servants’ hall at the end of a day” (pg 29). The constant debate as to what a ‘great’ butler really is caused Stevens to create boundaries for himself in his profession that completely overrule all other aspects of his life; the possibility of new adventures, careers, friendships, and future relationships. As such, this makes Stevens out to be a narrator with the most structured and constrained way of life I have ever read about, and it leads readers to take his recollection of events very cautiously because he is extremely unreliable.

This narrative is set in motion when Stevens is told by his boss Mr. Faraday that he should take a motoring trip away from Darlington Estate and take a break from his duties. This gives Stevens a lot to talk about, and I believe he started this journal as a way to document possibly the biggest trip of his life. It also seems to function as a message for other butlers that may read his writings, because he addresses an audience directly on multiple occasions, and treats the audience as though they have a base knowledge of all things butler-related time and time again. Throughout this book, the perspective of the narrator appears to be very instantaneous, which contradicts the journal-esque style of writing Stevens produces. This leads readers to believe that perhaps the things we are reading were documented very soon after they occurred, with the exception of the many past events that Stevens reminisces upon. The nature of this book in its’ entirety is a difficult concept to place; at a first glance it would seem as though the narrator is using this journal as an explanation for why he set out to Miss Kentons’ home in the first place, but on a deeper level I believe that Stevens is writing this journal as more of a confession, even though he does not realize that is what he is doing. The perspective of Stevens is a very shallow one, which contradicts the attention to detail he uses during his work as a butler. For all of his meticulous plans and work for Darlington Estate, Stevens has little to no knowledge of how to function as a human being. This causes his writing to be very separated from the situations he describes throughout the course of his trip. I found it particularly interesting that Stevens’ own emotions were so unnatural to him that he didn’t even notice when he was crying after the death of his Father. When Lord Darlington points out that it appears as though Stevens is crying, he states, “I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face. ‘I’m very sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day’” (pg 105). Stevens has effectively alienated himself from his own body, and the toll that took on the rest of his life caused him to miss out on the best parts of life, and a potential relationship with Miss Kenton. Although it is obvious to readers that he has feelings for her, he cannot understand them and would never make the first move to get to know her better. Overall, this book is fascinating read, and a very tragic story due to the restrained nature of Stevens’ personality, and how that affects his entire life and prevents him from being with the woman he might have loved.

The title itself sparks curiosity and hints at the events in the story. In the Old Testament, Hagar was a slave and the founder of Arabs—dark skinned people—who was cast out of the kingdom. Therefore, this story involves her children and all that happens to them.

While it is normal to read a short story with one plot, Edward P. Jones has elected to tell four all within the same story. These multiple plotlines create echoes throughout the story and makes the work multidimensional:

• The narrator investigates Ike’s murder
• The narrator and his relationship with Sheila
• The narrator and his presence at the death of Miriam Sobel, a white woman
• The past event in Alabama concerning his mother, Aunt Agatha, and Aunt Penny

These four plotlines are linked to each other and reveal to the narrator the actions women must take to protect themselves against male violence. It also shows us the narrator’s misunderstanding of women; he never looks farther than their job position as a secretary or them being a mother. This is interesting as his only interactions in this story are with women.

The last paragraph is a resolution for the narrator. For the first time he wonders what a woman is thinking when he pays attention to the six school girls walking down the street; he realizes that they have a complicated inner life. Furthermore, he realizes that the incident with Sheila—she didn’t notice him when she walked past him on the street—showed him that he wasn’t the center of her world as he had implied throughout the story. He further wonders what Ike had done to Alona that forced her to kill him. He understands this action was Alona’s only option and he now considers the inner harm that Ike inflicted on her. In addition, he acknowledges that women have more going on in their lives than just children and men. He had been oblivious to the harm men have done to women and resolves to stay with all the women who care about him.

Mr. Stevens, being the first-person narrator of this novel, is naturally unreliable; this is exacerbated by the fact that he fails to recognize his own emotions. His emotional state is not completely absent, however, though we are only told about it because another character mentions it to Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens is unable to comprehend the human spirit or warmth. This is the root cause of his failure to recognize his love for Ms. Kenton and his failure of moral responsibility.

In the prologue, Mr. Stevens mentions his inability to banter with his newest employer Mr. Farraday. He writes that “I did not take sufficient account of the fact that at that time of the day, what Mr. Farraday enjoys is a conversation of a light-hearted, humorous sort…I must say this business of bantering is not a duty I feel I can ever discharge with enthusiasm.” To his mind, he doesn’t want to banter because he doesn’t know when it will be appropriate to do so with his employer when, in actuality, he doesn’t recognize the spirit in which it is said.

When his father is ill, Mr. Stevens lack of emotional response is apparent to us. Firstly, when he visits his father as he lies sick in bed, he continues to say, “I hope Father is feeling better now…I’m very glad Father is feeling better…I’m glad Father is feeling so much better.” Mr. Stevens never slips and calls him with the familiar word Dad. While he is serving guests at the dinner party, his emotional response to his father’s poor condition is only told to us first by Mr. Cardinal and second by Lord Darlington:

“I say, Stevens, are you all right?”

I smiled again. “Quite all right, thank you, sir.”

“I say, Stevens, are you sure you’re all right there?”

“Perfectly all right, thank you, sir.”

Lord Darlington then approaches Mr. Stevens:

“Stevens, are you all right?”

“Yes, sir. Perfectly.”

“You look as though you’re crying.”

I laughed and taking out a handkerchief, quickly wiped my face. “I’m sorry, sir. The strains of a hard day.”

Mr. Stevens wouldn’t have told us his emotional state if it hadn’t been observed by these two characters. When his father dies later in the evening, Mr. Stevens continues on with his duties, telling Ms. Kenton that “I know my father would have wished me to carry on just now…to do otherwise, I feel, would be to let him down.” Not even his father comes before his duty.

The greatest example of his emotional shortcomings is when he obeys Lord Darlington’s command to fire the two Jewish maids. He doesn’t question this order, not even for a moment. He and Ms. Kenton have an argument:

“Mr. Stevens, I cannot quite believe my ears…I trust them absolutely and indeed they trust me. They have served this house excellently.”

“I am sure that is so, Miss Kenton. However, we must not allow sentiment to creep into our judgement.”

“I am telling you, Mr. Stevens, if you dismiss my girls tomorrow, it will be wrong, a sin as any sin ever was one, and I will not continue to work in such a house.”

“Miss Kenton, let me suggest to you that you are hardly well placed to be passing judgements of such a high and mighty nature…there are many things you and I are simply not in a position to understand…whereas his lordship…is somewhat better placed to judge what is for the best.”

There is a great chasm between Mr. Stevens and his emotions, his blind trust in the “greatness” of Lord Darlington, and his unwillingness even for a moment to think about the situation; if he had acknowledged the moral responsibility he had towards the two Jewish maids, the wrong actions of Lord Darlington would have been prevented. However, Mr. Stevens had no desire to allow his emotions into any facet of his life.

Mr. Stevens is so emotionally stunted that he cannot even offer condolences to Miss Kenton when her aunt dies. He wants to express his sympathy, but he cannot articulate the proper words, and he falls back upon what he knows best—his duty as the butler.

“As a matter of fact, Miss Kenton, I have to say this. I have noticed one or two things have fallen in standard just recently. I do feel you might be a little less complacent as regards new arrivals.”

For a second, Miss Kenton looked confused. Then she turned towards me and a certain strain was visible in her face. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Stevens?”

“For instance, Miss Kenton, although the crockery is being washed to as high a standard as ever, I have noticed it is being replaced on the kitchen shelves in a manner which, while not obviously dangerous, would nevertheless over time result in more breakages than necessary.”

“Is that so, Mr. Stevens?”

“It is not like you to have overlooked such obvious things, Miss Kenton.”

Miss Kenton looked away from me, and again an expression crossed her face as though she were trying to puzzle out something that had quite confused her. She did not look upset so much as she looked weary. Then she closed the sideboard, said: “Please excuse me, Mr. Stevens,” and left the room.

While Mr. Stevens didn’t mean to be so callous to Miss Kenton, this is nevertheless what he does to her. He is blind to his emotions therefore he can’t articulate them, and he fails in this relationship as he does in many other things.

It is only at the very end, after Miss Kenton tells him she loved him, do we hear him admit to his emotional state: “…for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed—why should I not admit it? —at that moment, my heart was breaking.” Yet, as the saying goes “too little, too late.” He has lost Miss Kenton and his chance at love.

As he sits on the pier, Mr. Stevens decides to learn bantering as he now realizes “that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.” Perhaps his newfound commitment will help him in making decisions based on his emotions, and he will live a better life than he had been for fifty years. We can only hope that he develops a moral responsibility and is able to create lasting friendships, but who can say what will become of Mr. Stevens?

I believe the reason that made the narrator tell her story about her boyfriend and the new neighbors coming in was the new neighbors (hence “The Weirdos”) but also, to some degree, her boyfriend’s weirdness, which he may also be tied into those she found weird. The narrator seemed to be either thinking or writing with no general audience except maybe her future self. Because she said that she and her boyfriend hadn’t been together long, on page 69, made all the events in the story recent — maybe not that day, when considering her boyfriend, but especially when the neighbors moved in. I believe toward the end of the story, we realized that the perspective was very recent, and I think it was at the point I mentioned above. The narrator believed this story was about her boyfriend and or the new neighbors, but it was about herself and the dark stance she had on the world and people around her. She thought all these people were weird and unusual, their routines, their speech, their belongings, their any and everything was weird. I don’t think she knew what to expect from any of them and misunderstood their motivations or anything from them, honestly. I start to wonder, now, if she was the weird one filled in a world surrounded by people who acted in such a way that is regarded as normal. The presentation of the story reminded me of not necessarily a reflection or self defense or confession, but a matter-of-fact, “this is weird, but what can I do?” stance. She sounded depressed but aggravated through most of the story, wishing for the end of something, anything. By the end of the story, she twisted around as she wondered what if her boyfriend was the man of her dreams and if she should stay. I think her dream of the monkey echoed with her boyfriend, but yet he ended up changing, to me at least, and she decided to stay. I think she still felt hated for him, though it may not be as strong at the end. I think she found this story meaningful to tell because it was, at the end, her change and acceptance of things.

I think the narrator of Malibu began his story because he needed someone to talk to about his eating disorder. He was very judgmental of other people, but he was also very insecure of himself. He continuously brought up the fact that he would purge after every meal and he never talked to anyone about this. The narrator seemed very lonely, even around his uncle and Terri. I would say that there were strong themes of loneliness in Malibu, but also feelings of inferiority mixed with feelings of superiority. Ultimately, the narrator was speaking to himself in way that he would have written inside of a diary. I think that he wanted to speak to someone about his illness, but he was afraid to do it.