A Rose for Emily, by Wiliam Faulkner

 Audiobook

Movie (Angelica Huston in it)

Written by Glòria Torner

SUMMARY
A Rose for Emily is William Faulkner’s best-known short story and, therefore, the most frequently anthologised. And it is also his first short story published in a national magazine, The Forum, in 1930, and, one year later, collected in These Thirteen. It was written during a period of great productivity of the author (1927-1931).
This story, with a non-linear structure, is narrated in the first-person plural, representing the voice of the people who give their opinions on the events, and it is divided in five sections.
Section I. Flashbacks. The ending and the beginning of the story.
The story begins at the end, after the death of Mrs Grierson, at the age of 74. That day, all the village, Jefferson, came to her funeral with respect and curiosity. People knew she didn’t let anyone inside her house, for decades, except her old negro servant, called Tobe.
Her house was once splendid, but, over the years, the aristocracy of Jefferson she belonged to decayed slowly. And now, of this house only remained the traces of grandeur.
In the old days, after Emily’s father died, the town mayor, Colonel Sartoris, made an exception for her —he decided she’d never have to pay taxes on the house. But time passed, and different people came into positions of power.
Ten years after the death of Colonel Sartoris, when Emily was sixty-two years old, the new mayor didn’t see the necessity to honour the agreement and decided to send Miss Emily a notice that she’d have to pay the taxes. She refused to pay, and a group of aldermen paid her a visit. Miss Emily’s old manservant let them into the parlour. The house was dirty and dusty and Emily appeared both overweight and wasted away, “she looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and of that pallid hue”. She didn’t invite anyone to sit. Instead of that, she remained in the parlour’s entryway and listened to the men explain their purpose. Against all their protests, she informed them and repeated that she has no taxes in Jefferson, and told them to see Colonel Sartoris. Of course, he was long dead.
Section II. Going back on the plot
Two years after his father’s dead and some time after her sweetheart had deserted her, the villagers were asking the authorities to do something because a terrible smell was emanating from the house. But they couldn’t get it, because there was no law requiring the cleaning of a house’s interior. Therefore, the neighbours poured quicklime around this nauseating house.
Section III. Homer Barron’s introduction
After her father’s death, Emily, about forty years old, was ill for a long and she reappeared as a lonely woman. Suddenly, her life will change.
Homer Barron, a contractor and foreman of a crew of workers, comes to Jefferson to build sidewalks, and he begins a relationship with Emily. She is in love with Homer, her ideal man. The women of the town gossip about this relationship because they consider him far beneath him. However, Emily always maintains the same attitude, haughty, arrogant and cold, towards the neighbours.
One day, Emily is seen buying poison. The pharmacist asks her several times if it is for rats, but she, simply, replies she wants arsenic.
Section IV. Emily’s hate and madness
The collective narrator, “We”, highlights gossip, social pressure and a lack of empathy. This voice describes now how is Emily and what happens in her house. As always, telling the story without order, villagers talk about out Homer Barron: “he likes men”, he is gone, he is back… Finally, it seems that they want to be married because she has bought the wedding gear, men’s clothes and, even, a nightgown for him to sleep in.
Her cousins visited Rose when she was seeing Homer. One day, after her cousins’ visit, Homer Barron disappeared and no one knew ever anything about.
The villagers don’t see her again, except, from time to time, when they catch glimpses of her silhouette through the curtains.
Section V. Final twist. The horror. The surprising truth behind the mystery
The story returns to the beginning, the day of the funeral. After the burial, the neighbours went up to her second-floor room. They had to break down the door and there they found Homer’s skeleton, lying in Emily’s bedroom, decorated like a bridal suite. Now with the sentence “a grey hair was found on the pillow next to Homer’s corpse”, we know that she has been sleeping with his corpse for years.
Finally, Emily has killed the object of her affection, so he will not abandon her, and she will live forever with her corpse.
The main themes
Isolation and Patriarchal Control: loneliness, mental decline, madness and decay through the sordid and sad life of Emily Grierson.
Tradition vs Progress: the story describes the deterioration of Southern aristocracy, the social pressure, culminating in the murdering of her lover, Homer Barrow. She refuses to accept changes.
Southern Gothic Element: death, necrophilia, the final image of her iron-grey hair near her pillow.
Symbolism: the house —the decadence; the Yankee north Homer Barron —the ideal man; Emily’s hair grey and other dark colours —sadness; the smell —the unpleasant part of the story and, of course, the rose —symbol of Emily’s faded dreams of love and marriage.
As many times in the story, we finish repeating the same sentence written in the story: “Poor Emily!”.
If we want to read an author similar to William Faulkner, we can choose Flannery O’Connor, with her story A good man is hard to find.

QUESTIONS
-There's a character in the story without much relevance, the servant. According to your opinion, why is it so?
-There's case of necrophilia in the story. Most of sexual paraphilias are taboo. Do you know any and what are they about?
-The story is about lifestyles that die. With every new generation something dies. What will die with our generation? Do you particularly like the phrase "the good old days", or you prefer to forget them?

VOCABULARY
frame house, scrolled balconies, eyesore, bemused, sluggishly, spare, horse and foot, teeming, slunk, lime, locusts, vindicated, riggers, cuss, kin, fallen out with, craned, imperviousness, blowing off, cabal, remitted, doddering, valance curtains

Second Best, by D. H. Lawrence

 Summary and analysis

Another summary

NOTES ABOUT THE STORY
Second Best is a story abut dualities, beginning by the title. Two rabbits, two sisters, two suitors, two dead moles. And everyone of these pairs are, in a certain way, opposites. One rabbit is wild and the other tame. Jimmy Barrass is an urban gentleman, with university education and Tom Smedley, a country lad, full of energy. Two dead moles, one by Anne’s hands, in a burst of anger, and the other, victim of Frances, killed by premeditation. Anne, a teenager country girl, is sensible; Frances, twenty-one and living in the city, is whimsical.

In the opening scene, the two sisters are sitting and talking on the grass in a field, and the nature is in full blossom. Anne is a beautiful plump girl, wise and practical. Frances is a student in Liverpool. They have just arrived from the city.

Anne, although several years younger, has the common sense of a mother.

While she is pulling a kernel out of its shell is she disclosing a secret?—, he talks to Frances about Tom.  She tells her that he has given her a wild rabbit, and yet she has already a tame rabbit. Here perhaps the narrator alludes to her innocence (the tame rabbit), and to the loss of it (the wild one).

Anne was hoping that Tom took her to a Feast, but instead he invited a servant from the rectory. Anne is angry and the narrator now mentions plants with thorns, as thistles, gorse, stubble…
Then a mole appears. At the beginning  both sisters see it as a beautiful creature. Anne catches the mole and plays with it. It’s blind, as love is —is it a symbol of Cupid? Frances tells her to kill the animal —it's a pest, but, for the moment, Anne doesn’t have the courage to do it. She wants to put it in her pocket, but you can’t imprison love and the mole revolts —love has no sense, it’s wild.

After that, Frances tells her that Jimmy Barrass, her would-be-fiancé, has comitted to another girl. Then the mole bits Anne; she bleeds and now does kill the mole: she has lost her innocence.
They cross a bridge and come to a field that shows all the summer splendour. Tom is mowing there. The air is full of intense smells.
They greet the vigorous country lad, well build and full of energy. And immediately, because he needs a woman, he fells in love with Frances —she wears a white dress, like a bride. Tom wonders is she would have the courage to kill a mole —to kill her romantic love.
Now it’s Frances turn, she has to make a decision —she also needs a man, and this new love has to be sensible. The next day she takes him a dead mole —she has killed definitively the love she felt for Jimmy, and offers herself, free of all constraints, to Tom.

QUESTIONS
-Killing animals. What has to be the human ethics about it? Is it ethically right? Always, or according to the case, to the species…?
-It appears that for Lawrence, being plump make you closer to nature. Do you think that our physical constitution has some influence in our character?
-Country people have a different way to see nature from city people. What can you tell about these differences?

VOCABULARY
turf, brimming, wilful, budding, kernel, fret her fat over, thistles, gorse, fallow, fidget, swaddled, crab-apples, stooks, moudiwarp, your rag out, cross, jawing about, winsome

Charity, by Joy Williams

 Summary and analysis (video)

Analysis of Joy Williams’s Stories

SOME DATA ABOUT HER BIOGRAPHY
Joy Williams was born in Massachusetts in 1944. Her father was a religious minister.
She studied at the University of Iowa (Raymond Carver was studying there at the same time).
She got married to Rust Hills, editor of Esquire, a men’s magazine, and moved to Florida, where she taught creative writing.
She wrote some novels (State of Grace, The Quick and the Dead), but she is best known for her short stories, where she displays her minimalist style. She was nominated once for the Pulitzer prize, and in 2021, she got the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
As an example of her minimalism we have her collection 99 stories of God. In her book The Visiting Privilege she has collected all her stories.

SUMMARY
The story starts in the dunes around White Sands Park. There, Janice and her husband (or partner) listen to a policeman telling them about the feelings he experienced being on a dune.
After this bizarre spontaneous explosion of sincerity, they went on driving through the Sands Park. Janice wanted to stop and get out of the car, but Richard wasn’t impressed by the place and refused to pull over. Nevertheless, after a while, he needed to stop to pee, and they pulled into a rest-stop. There, a couple with two children travelling on a van were holding a sign asking for money to get some petrol for their vehicle.
Janice decided she wanted to give them something, but Richard rode along. However, soon afterwards, he stopped to fill the tank at a gas station. There, while Richard was inside the shop, Janice changed places to sat on the driver’s seat and left the gas station —and Richard— behind. She drove back to the rest-stop where she found the family van. She told the woman, Rose, that she wanted to give some money for petrol. Rose, honest enough, accepted the offer, but told her it was better to go together to the petrol station to show Janice they would spend the money in petrol and not in anything else. It was a petrol station in front of the petrol station where she and Richard had stopped several minutes earlier, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Rose’s family appeared to be decent people, even as the children were a little bit naughty. The boy, Zorro, was a little bit too active, and the girl, Zoebella, too pertly clever. Still, their parents seemed to be good people. However, Janice’s first intention to give them only twenty dollars didn’t work —in an outburst of charity, she paid for the bill’s mechanic at the garage where they had the van repaired, she paid for the food at the restaurant where they waited for the mechanic finishing his work, and then, as the repair needed some days, she offered to take them to their place, although it didn’t lay exactly in her way home.
During the trip, they had a car accident because Zorro suddenly jerked the steering wheel and Janice coudn’t control her car. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but Janice was exhausted and deeply upset. They had to abandon the car and stay at a motel. Although Rose insisted that Janice needed some rest, they ended up together in the same room, the only one suitable to sleep in. But, all in all, in the end she fell asleep. She dreamt she was on the road alone hoping somebody would pick her up and take her home.

QUESTIONS
-They say you’re getting old when you aren’t able to feel enthusiasm. What is your opinion about it?
-What do you know about dog’s behaviour? Can dogs identify their names?
-“She distrusted speech as a way of expressing thoughts.” How else can you express your thoughts?
-When we’re generous, aren’t we selfish all the same (because being generous please our feelings)?
-Do you usually think things twice?
-Do you sometimes dislike somebody only for their clothes?
-When you give charity, do you try to check how they will spend it?
-Do you think people have a more beautiful appearence when they are “good”?
-According to a saying, blind people are more suspicious. What is your view?
-What do you usually borrow from hotels and restaurants when you leave?

VOCABULARY
wears, take a leak, ramada, rummaging, grille, brave, shot glasses, signed, low rider, retrieved, queasy, trading post, road runner, fitted beedsheet, pull over, misery lights, drummed out, blacktop road, stony wash, axles, sacred datura, bath crystals, swatted, scootch

The Reencounter, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Original edition

Analysis

Written by Aurora Ledesma

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired Jewish writers of the twentieth century, as well as an important figure of literature written in Yiddish, the language in which his books were published throughout his career. His writings describe Jewish life in Poland and in the United States.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 11th of November 1903 in Leoncin, Poland. He was the fifth of six children, of whom only four survived childhood. His father was a rabbi, and his mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Bilgoraj. His sister Hinde Esther and his brother Israel Joshua, became writers as well and played prominent roles in his life and served as models for a number of fictional characters. His younger brother, Moishe and his mother both died in the Holocaust.

His family moved to Warsaw, Poland, when he was four years old. Singer was also educated in a strict spiritual practice. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. Singer preferred being a writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made his debut with the story In Old Age which he published in Warsaw. His first novel Satan in Goray was published in Poland before he migrated to the U.S.A. in 1935.

He was married in Poland and had a son, but when he moved to New York, he left them, and then, in 1938, he met Alma Wassermann, a German Jewish refugee, and married her. He settled in New York, as his brother had done a year before. Singer worked for the Yiddish newspaper Forvets and he also translated many books into Yiddish from Hebrew and Polish; and from German, some books by Thomas Man.

Although Singer’s works were now available in their English versions, he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish until his death.

Singer’s has popular collections of short stories translated into English, one of the most popular around the world is Gimpel the Fool. His short stories are saturated with Jewish folklore, legends and mysticism.

Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story, which have been adapted into films. The most famous story adapted to a film is Yentl with Barbara Streisand. He also wrote My Father’s Court, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Warsaw.

He died on the 24th of July, 1991, in Surfside Florida, after suffering a series of strokes. He was buried at Cedar Park Cemetery, New Jersey.

SUMMARY

The story appears in Singer’s 1982 anthology The Collected Stories, a selection of forty-seven works spanning his career and blending Jewish folklore, mysticism, and modern irony.

This is a story of ghosts and the afterlife, a theme that our author Isaac Bashevis Singer loved so much.

Dr. Max Greitzer is abruptly awakened by a phone call informing him of the death of Liza Nestling, a woman who was deeply significant in his life. She had been his great love. Despite the years of separation, the news shocks him, reminding him of their tumultuous thirteen-year love affair,which ended twelve years ago without any communication since. 

Greitzer gets dressed and heads to the funeral parlor in New York City for the service, arriving early. At the parlor, the receptionist escorts him to view Liza’s body in a dimly lit room. Liza lies in a simple coffin. Her face, covered with gauze, is completely unrecognizable, her hair has lost the shine of her youth, and her face, full of wrinkles, is covered by thick makeup. A hint of a smile appears on her lips. How can they do that?, he wonders.

The door of the room opens and a woman, who resembles Liza, enters. At first he thinks it’s Liza’s sister, but then he realizes that this woman is actually Liza herself. This surreal situation reveals a shocking truth: both are now dead and experiencing a strange afterlife together.

They grapple with the absurdity of the situation, wondering how they can remain conscious and aware of everything without their physical bodies. They discuss their pasts, including Liza’s marriage and challenging life, experiencing a mixture of amusement, irony and sadness as they reflect on their deaths and the lack of emotion they feel in this new state. As they float outside, observing the familiar world below, they wonder what life after death means.

They feel liberated from earthly pains, but realize a significant emptiness where their desires once resided. Finally, they begin to rise together, without a destination, gazing down at the earth. Now they embark on a hopeful journey into the unknown reflecting on immortality and the disappointments of life.

SOME REFLECTIONS

The Reencounter is a modern ghost story that prioritizes irony over traditional horror. The author shows us his preference for afterlife stories and he does so with a magnificent sense of humor that hooks us all. The narrative critiques the futility of immortality and treats it with sarcasm and philosophical resignation, as Max says, “of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest”.

This story is interesting and engaging to us, because we wonder what will happen to us after we die. Death is one of life’s greatest mysteries because we do not get to understand it until we are dead.

QUESTIONS

-Do you like visiting cemeteries? What can you tell about any you have visited?

-Do you believe in afterlife? In your opinion, what is there after we’re dead?

-In your view, is it possible a communication between living people and dead people? Have you ever player Ouija, or used the services of a psychic?

-According to you, what important things have to be said in a funeral, or written in an obituary?

-Are all philosophic works sheer nonsense?

-What do you know about Yiddish?

VOCABULARY

rouged, awry, eulogy, wreath, stingy, astral

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien

 

 Animation summary (full novel)

Interview with Tim O'Brien about his book

Written by Pere Vila

THE AUTHOR

Tim O’Brien was born on October the1st, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota. He is an American novelist noted for his writings about American soldiers in the Vietnam War. O’Brien was the son of a schoolteacher and an insurance salesman who had served in World War II. When he was ten, his family ―including a younger brother and sister― moved to Worthington, Minnesota. This place had a large influence on O’Brien’s imagination and his development as an author. The town is on Lake Okabena, in the southwestern part of the state, and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in The Things They Carried.

After studying political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army. In later talks and essays, O’Brien has described how conflicted he felt when he was drafted. He said he often felt restless and shaped by its conservative civic culture. Opposed to the Vietnam War, he spent the summer of 1968 working in a meatpacking plant, while he worried about his draft notice. O’Brien has recalled feeling pulled in two directions: toward his anti-war convictions on one side and, on the other, toward family expectations, hometown loyalties, and fear of being a coward if he refused to serve. In his public lectures, he uses this period to illustrate the moral pressure many draftees experienced as they decided whether to enter the Army, resist the draft, or leave the country. He had been opposed to the war and intended to go to Canada while in training in Washington. Instead, he returned to the army base out of fear, and the following year he was sent to fight in Vietnam.

During his tour of duty, he walked with his platoon to the village of My Lai, where a massacre of unarmed villagers by another platoon had occurred in March 1968, unbeknownst at the time to O’Brien and his fellow soldiers. Years later he would return to Vietnam and revisit My Lai, and write about his experience in a powerful essay for The New York Times, called “The Vietnam in me”.

When he returned to the U.S., he studied intermittently at Harvard University and worked for The Washington Post (1971-74), as an intern and reporter. He collected his newspaper and magazine articles about his war experiences in his first book If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, by turns meditative and brutally realistic; it was praised for its honest portrayal of a soldier’s emotions.

The Vietnam War is present in many of O’Brien’s novels: Going after Cacciato; the already mentioned If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home; In the Lake of the Woods; The Things They Carried; Tomcat in Love; etc.

Among other prizes, O’Brien won the 1979 National Book Award; The James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, in 1995; The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, in August 2012; and in 2010, he received The Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Whittier College.

 

THE STORY

The Things They Carried is a collection of interconnected short stories about the experiences of a small company of young American men serving in the Vietnam War. The book blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, leaving the reader unsure as to what is fact and what is myth. It is told mainly from the first-person perspective of a middle-aged narrator named Tim O’Brien (the same name of the author), who is looking back on his time during the war. The first story, the one we read, gives its name to the entire book and is a kind of introduction to the main characters and everything they carry, both physically and emotionally.

The story begins with the letters sent by a girl, Martha, which lieutenant Jimmy Cross was carrying. These letters appear throughout the story, as a reference to the past that Cross has left behind and which is very different from the reality he lives in Vietnam. Then the narrator goes on to detail what some of the soldiers carried. First, he details what they carried according to psychological needs, for example: Kiowa carried his father’s New Testament and his grandfather’s old hatchet; Henry Dobbins, in dangerous situations, carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter; Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers and 6 or 7 ounces of premium dop… All this mixed with the detailed description of the weight of their weapons, ammunition, helmets, bulletproof vests, mine detectors, radios, flares, etc.

Little by little, learning how things weigh, we get into the activities and routines of one platoon of 17 men in the Vietnam War: like marching in a line through the meadows and rice fields to the coordinates of an ambush; or how they chose by lot who would enter the tunnels that the Vietnamese strategically built to hide; or how they dug the holes in which they had to spend the night. Until the story reaches a turning point: The death of Ted Lavender.

Everyone is affected by the death of their comrade. While waiting for the chopper to evacuate the dead man, they smoke Ted’s drug, as a kind of tribute and release from the pain of the loss. Then they entered the village of Than Khe and burned everything, shot the chickens and dogs, they called in artillery and watched the wreckage.

Lieutenant Cross feels responsible for Lavender’s death and takes his position more seriously: he burns Martha’s letters and photos. Henceforth he would shut down the daydreams, he would not tolerate laxity, he would show strength, he needed to distance himself from his men, and reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead.

 

STYLISTIC KEYS OF THE AUTHOR

Metafiction: O’Brien frequently addresses the act of storytelling itself, drawing attention to the artificiality of narrative and the author’s role. He often affirms that a story isn’t true in a literal sense but that it is true in the sense of capturing a particular emotional or psychological reality.

Fragmentation: His stories often lack a traditional narrative structure, jumping between time periods and perspectives. This fragmentation mirrors the fractured nature of memory and the disorientation experienced by soldiers in combat.

Repetition and Motif: O’Brien uses repetition and recurring motifs to emphasize key themes and create emotional resonance. The image of the weight carried by soldiers ―both physical and emotional― is a prominent motif in The Things They Carried.

Lyrical Prose: Despite dealing with difficult subject matter, O’Brien’s prose is often remarkably beautiful and evocative. He employs vivid imagery and poetic language to create a powerful emotional impact.

“Happening Truth”: O’Brien frequently speaks of a “Happening Truth”, a truth that isn’t necessarily factual but is emotionally and psychologically authentic. This concept is central to his writing. He argues that stories can be true even if they did not happen exactly as told. The goal is not to report facts but to convey a deeper understanding of the human experience.

 

IN MY OPINION

This story is highly recommended to the times we live in, when wars spread so easily. We have in our hands an anti-war book par excellence. All the events narrated in the story lead us to reject wars, such as the death of Lavender and its consequences, that we have already seen above. This is a clear example of how brutal wars are. However, there are two more examples that I would like to comment on: one is Martha’s virginity, and the other what we could call Sander’s gift.

Martha’s virginity.  Throughout this chapter of the book, Lieutenant Cross reflects at least five times on Martha’s virginity. Is Martha a virgin or not?, Cross asks himself. We don’t need to know. What matters is what O’Brien (the author) wants to convey to us with this fact. Martha’s letters talk about teachers, classmates, writers, poets… She never mentions the war. She lives in another world. She lives immaculately, without having to do horrible things. She carries no stain, nor does she imagine the hell that Jimmy Cross is going through. She does not suspect how dirty war is, how it profanes the integrity of the soldiers, who are stained for life. Martha’s virginity is for Cross like a mirror, where every time he looks at it, he sees himself dirtier.

Sander’s gift. This is the episode where Mitchell Sander finds the dead body of a Viet Cong boy. Sander says: Here it is a definite moral. And he cuts off the dead boy’s thumb and gives it to Norman Bowker, who will carry it on his person from then on. Then they argue about the morality of this event, but it is really hard to see the moral here. However, if we look just before these events, Bowker is described as a good person, literally “a very gentle person”. Under normal circumstances, a good person would never accept a gift of this kind. But they are in a cruel war, and Bowker accepts the gift. So, the moral is that no matter how good a person you are, in a war to survive you have to do horrible things. And they remember the old TV series Have gun, will travel, where if you have a gun, use it and you will be able to move forward, survive. So, we see how war brutalizes good people.

 

TO FINISH

Tim O’Brien work has helped redefine the war narrative, moving away from traditional heroic portrayals and focusing instead on the psychological and emotional toll of conflict. His innovative use of metafiction and his exploration of the relation between truth and storytelling have inspired countless writers. His commitment to honesty, vulnerability and emotional depth has earned him a place among the most important American authors of his generation. He forces readers to confront the complexities of truth and the enduring power of stories to shape our understanding of the world.

O’Brien’s legacy is not simply about writing about war, it is about writing about what means to be human: to remember, to grieve, to search for meaning in a chaotic world, and to understand that the stories we tell ourselves and each other ultimately define us.

 

QUESTIONS

-What things would you carry (in an emergency, in an epidemic, to a desert island…)?

-Are they fair wars and unfair wars, or are all the wars unjustifiable?

-How can an Indian become a Christian? How is possible for a person fit two contradictory behaviours or beliefs / faiths?

-Would you justify SIW in order to avoid going to war?

-What do you think it’s better for a country, a compulsory military service for everybody, or a professional army? Expose your reasons.

 

VOCABULARY

(There are unnumbered military terms in the text: we’ll try to explain them in our session.)

foxhole, canteen, major, killer, magazine, swabs, slingshot, bad news, draw numbers, rabies, spools, fatigues, sniper, frisking, smokestacks, wiggy, talons

Happy Endings, by Margaret Atwood

 Audiobook

Analysis (video)

Themes in ths story

Written by Glòria Torner

BIOGRAPHY

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). When she was seven years old, her family moved to Toronto, but she still spent much of her childhood in the northern Ontario and Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entomologist, conducted research in forests. Her love for nature influenced her writing. She became a voracious reader of literature: pocketbook mysteries, Canadian animal stories and comic books. She did not attend school full-time until she was twelve years old.
Atwood realised she wanted to write professionally when she was sixteen. She studied and received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1961, where she published poems and articles in the college literary journal. Later, she studied and obtained a master’s degree in English literature from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1962.
Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer, in 1968, but they divorced in 1973. She had a long-term relationship with the Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, living together in Toronto until his death in 2019. She wrote about her lover, Gibson, in the poetry book, Dearly.
She is a prolific writer. Since 1961 she has published eighteen novels, eighteen books of poetry, eleven books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children’s books, two graphic novels and a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her autobiography, called Book of Lives: A Memoir, was published in 2025.
In addition to writing, she taught English literature at several Canadian and American universities.

The main themes in her literature are:
Dystopian and speculative and science fiction.
Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin are historical novels, and the MaddAddam trilogy engages themes of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, and man-made disaster.
She published her dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1985. This novel tells the story of Offred, a woman living in a sexual slavery, in a repressive Christian theocracy in the future. She recounts her daily experiences of her life as a “Handmaid”, forced to bear children for the higher-ranking members of Gilead society. As most women cannot conceive children, Offred and some other young women, who live without freedom and under oppression, provide children for influential families.
This book, criticised as immoral in Christian societies, was adapted into a film in 1990, and an acclaimed TV series based on the novel was co-written by the author in 2017. In 2019 she wrote a sequel, The Testaments.
Afterwards, in The Heart Goes Last, the writer imagines a dystopian America in which a couple is compelled to join a community that functions like a prison.
The theory of Canadian identity and memory. This theory has garnered attention both in Canada and internationally in her principal work of literary criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. She postulates that Canadian literature, and by extension Canadian identity, is characterised by the symbol of survival.
Gender, identity and feminism. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, published in1969, is an early example of feminism, a topic found in many of her works.
Animal rights. Surfacing is an exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, and in Cat’s Eye, the narrator recognises the similarity between a turkey and a baby survivor.
She writes about other themes: religion and myth, climate change, power politics. Sometimes, several themes are interconnected within a single novel.
She has won, among other prices, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2008, the Pen Pinter Prize, in 2016, and two Booker Prizes, in 2000 and 2019.
 
HAPPY ENDINGS

This short story was first published in 1983 in the Canadian collection Murder in the Dark, and in1994 it was available in the United States in Good Bones and Simple Murders.
It is a short story structured into eight sections: six varying, interlocked narratives and two brief sections, one at the beginning of the story, and the other one at the end.
In the first section (I think), Margaret Atwood decides to use the interrogative pronouns “Who” and “What,” following “The 5Ws”: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and one more, “H” How?” Many journalists use this framework to communicate the most relevant information of the story in a newspaper article. And these three sentences are used as an introduction by the narrator who addresses readers directly as you, and comments on the craft of storytelling during and after the narratives.
The six variations are written using these five plot elements. I’ll use this structure in the first one, but I think it is not necessary in the other ones.
Exposition: John and Mary fall in love and get married.
Rising action: they have good jobs, buy a beautiful house, and have two children.
Climax: they have some friends and a stimulating sex life.
Falling action: they retire and enjoy their hobbies.
Resolution: they die.
In this second storyline, Mary falls in love with John, who doesn’t love her, he only uses her for sex, but she hopes that he will come to love her. One day, John is in a restaurant with another woman, Madge. When Mary’s friends tell her he is cheating with Madge, Mary collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find and takes them with half a bottle of sherry. She leaves a note for John, but she thinks he’ll discover her, take her to the hospital, and later marry her. But this fails to happen. Mary dies and John marries Madge.
Now, in the third structure, John, an old man, who has a steady respectable job, is married to Madge. He is having an affair with Mary, a young girl. She has sexual relations with him, but she doesn’t love him because she prefers James, who is the same age as her, has a motorcycle and a fabulous record collection. One day, James discovers John and Mary in the bed. James shoots the two of them and commits suicide. At the end, Madge marries Fred. It is a love triangle.
In this fourth storyline, Fred and Madge are happy together. They have a nice house near the seashore. One day, a tidal wave approaches their home. Despite the loss of their home, they are grateful to have survived the calamity that killed thousands. They remain together. This ending is very similar to the first one.
In the fifth storyline, Fred has a bad heart and he dies. Afterwards, Madge devotes herself to charity work. However, the narrator address directly to the reader in 2n person, and tells them that these details can be changed. You can choose: Madge could have different endings: cancer…
In the last storyline the narrator suggests that the story can be changed again, making John a revolutionary, and Mary a secret agent who starts a relationship with him in order to spy on him. This story is very similar to the first story.
The last section has two brief remarks: the narrator observes that the endings of different plots are the same: death is the only true ending that comes to all of us, and therefore to all characters. But the beginnings are more fun. Plot is fundamentally, just one thing happening after another. Intentionally, she forgets “where”, “how” and “why”.

Conclusion
Margaret Atwood writes a story about writing stories with six different scenarios, always with a relationship between a man and a woman. Plain stories without poetry and sensibility. Too much pessimism! And with an unreal title!

QUESTIONS
-Do you think plot is only “one thing after another”? What do you know of Todorov’s Five Stages of Plot?
-According to a theory, girls usually prefer bad boys to goody-goody ones. Do you think it is a real fact or it is something conjuntural?
-What is happiness? What is for you the best/most original definition of happiness? How do you know if you're happy or you aren't? How do you know when other people are or arent happy? Is happiness an invention of the consumer society?

VOCABULARY
live-in, tepid, run-down, higher, underwater, stoned, brawling

Physics and Chemistry, by Jackie Kay

 

Review

Another review

Analysis

A BIT OF BIOGRAPHY
Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961. Her biological mother was Scottish, and her biological father, Nigerian. She was adopted soon after being born by a politically activist couple, John and Helen Kay from Glasgow. This couple had previously adopter her brother.
As a curiosity, Jackie worked for some months as a cleaning woman for John Le Carré, the spy novels writer.
She wanted to be an actress, but after reading the stories by Alasdair Gray, she decided to be a writer. She studied English at the University of Sterling.
She writes poetry, novels, short stories and plays. Her topics are adoption, gender, sexuality, activism and family relationships.
Her most famous book is Trumpet, about a jazz musician who, once dead, they discovered he was a woman.
Our short story appeared in a book called Why don’t you stop talking?
Now she works as a professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
About her private life, we can say she had a son with another writer, then she had a long relationship with a poetess who had a daughter with a poet. So, a life full of books and writers.

 

SUMMARY

This is a story about two middle-aged female teachers. In the story, they don’t have names, they are referred only by the subject they teach, Physics and Chemistry. A part of being workmates, they’ve been living together for a long time, and they know each other very well. Physics is serious and introvert, and Chemistry is more open and doesn’t have problems expressing her emotions.

They are good teachers and in general are respected by their colleagues. Perhaps somebody can think they are a typical pair of spinsters, but if somebody does, they keep their opinion by themselves.

One day, after being in a concert they liked very much, they make love for the first time. For both of them it was a very satisfying experience, and it even changed a bit of Physics character: from this day on, she was less shy and maybe a bit daring. However, they go on being cautious about this new twist in their relationship. Moreover, they are modest and avoid talking to each other openly about their physical encounters.

But some time after this new path in their lives, a pupil’s parent comes to the school accusing the two teachers of being lesbians. Of course, the headmaster has to talk to them and explain the resolution he has decided to take.

 

QUESTIONS

-According to you, what is the best way to share the domestics tasks?

-How do you feel talking about sex? Why do you think people are usually shy about this topic?

-When you introduce yourself, do you think you have to define your sexual orientation? What aspects of your life do you think you must communicate to your boss or to your workmates?

-Can someone be fired because of their sexual orientation?

-What do you know about these new terms/concepts: gender versus sex, binary/nonbinary, gender-fluid…?

-In the story, something causal has chanced the life of our protagonists. In your opinion, what is more decisive in our lives, chance or will? Why do you think so?

 

VOCABULARY

poaching, shade of emulsion, serviced the car, seeped, glee, blissfully, put my foot in, wallop, fumed, gaffes, lemon grass, wee jug, marking, shoogle, had…round, bubbling, has been up, giving…notice, bobbles, plain/purl