Review
SUMMARY
Dulcie is a shop assistant working in a big department store. She doesn’t like much her job (the narrator says in that store they could sell everything), and she earns a very small salary for her work. Also, she lives poorly in a very small lodging (a furnished room) and she is all the time under the watch of her landlady. In her apartment there are the usual simple pieces of furniture, and on the walls some pictures of historical figures. The one she has more reverence for is general Kitchener’s. She doesn’t know who exactly was.
One day, a man they call Piggy asks her for a date.
They are going to go out to a restaurant, to the cinema or the theatre, etc.
Piggy (his real name is Willy) is an elegant man and appears to have a lot of
money. Every girl has to be happy to have a date with him, but at the same time
girls say he is a prowler in search of beautiful girls, a womanizer who only
wants to seduce and forget. Dulcie is elated about the date and she wants to
dress beautifully, but she calculates all the money she has until the last cent,
and she realizes she doesn’t have enough to buy the things she would like to shop
for. So she feels a big disappointment with her life.
The appointed time comes, and Piggy goes to pick
Dulcie up, but at the last moment Dulcie looks for an excuse (that she’s ill, or
something) to not go out with him. Feeling miserable, she sits to have her poor
dinner, alone and pitiful. But perhaps another day she’ll go out with Piggy,
who knows.
This is Dulcie’s story.
But what about the dream? How does it finish?
QUESTIONS
Do you think there is a heaven or a hell? How do you
imagine them? Nietzsche said hell or heaven is our life lived over and over
again after we die.
Why do you think Dulcie doesn’t want to go out?
Who are the people in the pictures on the wall?
General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, O’Callahan.
Do you think that if all the world’s wealth will be
distributed between all the people on the planet in order to make everybody
equal (in the question of money), we here would be poorer? And what about “the
next day will be rich people and poor people again”?
What is a fair salary? What do you think: A person has
to earn according to their necessities or according to their skills or talents?
Do you think if you earn more money, your work is better?
VOCABULARY
groan, bar-of-judgement, follow suit, bondsmen, cereus, dime, licorice, carouse, swine, marshmallows, pongee, spurious, rickety, snippy