A Painful Case, by James Joyce

James Joyce at the Wikipedia
A Painful Case at the Wikipedia
Audiobook

Analysis and summaries:

 

JAMES JOYCE, by Glòria Torner

James Joyce is one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.

 

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.

He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.

He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.

He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.

Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.

Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.

In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916 he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.

Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemachus) the same hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost every other literary technique to present his characters.

Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.

Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer.


SOME FACTS ABOUT JOYCE

He was the eldest of ten brothers and sisters.

His family were very poor, but his father had some airs. He didn’t belong to the working classes, he had “business”, and in all of them he failed. He was not a hard-working man, but he wanted some education for James: after a lot of pleading, he got a seat for him in a well-known and high reputation Jesuit School.

Joyce studied languages at the University and, after that, he went to Paris to try to study medicine, but he spent his days there reading in libraries.

When he was 22, he met Nora Barnacle, and, in the second date, she masturbated him, and they started being together for the rest of their lives.

The next year, they ran away from Dublin and went to live abroad forever. They lived in Trieste, Rome, Zurich and Paris. At the beginning he worked as an English teacher, and in a bank translating letters from Italian to English. But then he asked money to institutions to write his masterpiece, Ulysses. He got it from sponsors and from the British government. He didn’t earn anything from his books.

Although we can imagine him as a bohemian artist, he was not any of it because he was essentially a family man. He worked doing English classes (for instance, he taught English to Italo Svevo) to provide for his family, and, apart from this, he wrote following his artistic call.

He had a lot of health problems with his eyes, and there were some periods when he was almost blind. But he continued writing all his life. His wife was a bit illiterate and she only read one of his books, the collection of poems Chamber Music. She asked him to write more commercial books.

He died at the age of 59 of a sudden illness.


WORKS

James Joyce is known for his experimental novel Ulysses. In this novel, Joyce tells us about one day in the life of a very ordinary man. It’s a thick book and hard to read, but it has a lot of radical fans. Before this, he wrote some poetry (but he wasn’t very happy with it), some short stories under the title of Dubliners (following Ibsenian ideas and style), a novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (a Bildungsroman), and another experimental novel, more extreme than Ulysses, under the title of Finnegan's Wake.

In Dubliners, Joyce tried to make a portrait of Dublin’s moral personality, and he arranged its stories according to the ages of a person (childhood, youth, maturity, old age). He had a lot of difficulties to publish it because a lot of real people and real places appeared in the book, and he didn’t want to change anything to hide real names under fictious names. They are “classical” texts, very different from his most famous works. The last story, “The Dead”, has been made in a film directed by John Huston.


A PAINFUL CASE

According to one letter to his brother, this story was one of the worst of the collection, but then it’s a story with two books studying only it.

It is a short story belonging to the group of “maturity”. It narrates the voluntary loneliness of a self-made single man and the involuntary one of a married woman. The man is very proud of being alone, because this way he can spend his free time on his intellectual and lofty hobbies. He meets a married woman, but he doesn’t want an affair, he only wants a listener. When the woman tries to make some advances, he breaks up the relationship because he thinks that between a man and a woman friendship is impossible. Afterwards, the woman has a depression and dies in an accident in a railway station, and he feels (and not only knows) his loneliness.

The form of the story is a classical one: first introduces the characters, then there is a conflict and a solution for this conflict, and last of all, a moral reflexion.

 

 

QUESTIONS

Can you describe in your own words Mr Duffy (that in Gaelic means “black” or “dark”)? Age, personality, physical appearance, job, interests…

From the description of his lodgings, what can deduce about Mr Duffy’s personality?

Why do you think that the Maynooth Catechism is “sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook?

What do you know about Hauptmann’s Michael Krammer?

And about Nietzsche?

Mr Duffy eats arrowroot cookies because they are healthy. Do you think eating healthily can make a person better? What is your opinion about “you are what you eat”?

Mr Duffy thought that he could be a rebel sometimes and rob a bank. Was this only a bluff, or was it for real?

Describe Mrs Sinico in your words

Mrs Sinico is pictured as having an intelligent face. Do you think that the face can be the mirror of a person’s personality or qualities?

What do you know about astrakhan?

How did Mr Duffy and Mrs Sinico come to know each other?

What kind of friendship did they have? What did they usually do in their dates? Was there any love between them?

What was Mrs Sinico’s role for her husband? And for Mr Duffy?

What city is Leghorn? Do you know other cities with names very different from the native language?

Can you explain why he liked Mozart, according to your opinion?

What do you know about the Irish Socialist Party? What were Mr Duffy political ideals?

Talk about Mrs Sinico’s family.

“Every bond is a bond of sorrow”. What does it mean? Do you think it’s true?

“Friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse”: what is your opinion about this?

How did Mrs Sinico die?

How did the breaking up of her relationship with Mr Duffy affect her?

How did Mrs Sinico’s death affect Mr Duffy? Did he hate her, or did he pity her?

Can you explain the metaphor of the “worm with a fiery head” and the end of the story? (page 9 line 1)

Is it possible to compare this story with Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or The Lady with the Dog? What do they have in common? What differences are there between them?

 VOCABULARY

mean, shallow, double desk, alcove, Bile Beans, saturnine, tawny, hazel, arrowroot, bill of fare, roaming, thinly (peopled), house, plying, garret, timorous, wages, phrasemonger, impresario, propped, haze, buff, reefer overcoat, inquest, league, threadbare, hobbling, shop, gaunt, withheld, gnawed



Dry September, by William Faulkner

William Faulker at the Wikipedia

Dry September:

-Cliffs Notes

-Audiobook

-Video analysis

A Rose for Emily (short film)

Barn Burning (short film)

That Evening Sun (video summary)

WILLIAM FAULKNER, by Glòria Torner

William Faulkner is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century in American literature. And he is also one of the fundamental names with influential narrative techniques, especially the use of interior monologue, following the experimental tradition of European writers as James Joyce, Virginia Wolf, Marcel Proust and Frank Kafka. Faulkner’s writing diverges from that of his realistic contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway.

Faulkner, and other American writers called “the lost generation”, influenced Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, etc.


BIOGRAPHY

William Faulkner was born in 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. He came from an old Southern family.

He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, where the Faulkner family settled in 1902 and where he lived on and off for the rest of his life. His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother, Lelia Butler, and Caroline Barr, the African American nanny who raised him from infancy, influenced the development of Faulkner’s artistic imagination. Both his mother and his grandmother, who were avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educated him in visual language and also exposed him to literary classics such as the works of Charles Dickens.

Faulkner spent his boyhood listening to stories told by his elders, stories about the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and the Faulkner family. The young Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived, Mississippi, that marked his sense of the tragic position of “black and white” Americans and his characterization of Southern characters.

He began his academic instruction and, as a schoolchild, he got early successes, but later he became somewhat indifferent; then at high school his decline continued, and at the end he never got graduated. He abandoned his studies in 1915 to work in his grandfather’s bank.

He joined the Canadian and later the British Royal Air Force during the First World War, but he did not serve in combat. After the war he returned to the United States and, for a short period of time, he studied literature at the University of Mississippi (1919-1921).

He temporarily worked for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper.

In 1920, he married Estella Oldham Franklin, with whom he had been in love since he was a teenager. After Estella’s divorce from her first husband, the writer wasted no time in getting her to accept his marriage’s proposal.

Faulkner began writing poetry. He made his debut as a writer in 1924 by publishing the poetry book The Marble Faun (1919) and Poems of Youth (1924). He declared: “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

Except for some trips to Europe and Asia, and a few brief stays in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, he worked on his numerous novels (nineteen), screenplays, poems and short stories on a farm in Oxford.

In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a crowd of characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. Each story and each novel contribute to the construction of a whole portrait of the south of his country, creating an imaginary name called Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants.

The six most important novels are:

1. The Sound and the Fury (1929). The theme, the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters, and the technique, the use of the inner monologue, are fused with particular success.

2. As I Lay Dying (1930). It’s a difficult book because it’s a masterpiece of modernism literature. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor rural family’s quest and motivations to satisfy her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.

3. Sanctuary (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished Southern family.

4. In Light in August (1932), prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe Christmas, who believes that one of his parents was black.

5, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is about the racial prejudice in which a young man is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood.

6. In Wild Palmers (1939) he explains two different stories together in one book.

His last novel, The Reivers, a picaresque tale of a young boy with great many similarities to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death.

Faulkner got different prizes as the Pulitzer Price in Fiction in 1955 for A Fable, and in 1963 for The Reivers. In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.

Nowadays, he is best remembered for his novels about the Southern American States.

 

DRY SEPTEMBER. ANALYSIS

Dry September was first published in the magazine Scribner in 1931 and reprinted in Faulkner’s Collected Stories (1950) and in the Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner (1961).

The title is very important because it suggests that the lack of rain through the hottest part of the Mississippi summer will be the symbol of a terrible problem.

The story is divided in five parts, and it begins “in medias res” (in the middle of events).

Part I. THE RUMOUR

This first part opens with a short description of the dry weather and the season, presenting the setting of the story: “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days.”

And also introduces the first conversation, the rumour that they are talking about “something that happened between the black man, Will Mayes, and Miss Minnie Cooper, the white woman.”

After this first descriptive and presentative paragraph, this first part goes on with a long dialogue in direct style with short sentences between six people: the main character, the barber, Henry Hawkshaw, a calm, quiet and just man, who objects the rumour that serves for the story; and the intolerant people: the second barber, the young client Butch, the second speaker and Jack, the drummer.

In the middle of this section, John McLendon arrives at the barbershop and encourages the men to take action against Will Mayes, because for McLendon it is more important to increase the racial conflict than discover the truth. He begins and increases the racial tension.

The only thing everyone seems to agree with is the race of the two people. It would seem that Will Mayes is a murderer simply for being an African American. Nobody really knows what happened between the “negro” and Miss Minnie Cooper, but the town reaction to the rumour is that Miss Minnie, a spinster, has been harmed and attacked in some way by Will Mayes. Only the barber, Henry Hawkshaw, claims that Will Mayes is a good man and, in this part, he repeats several times this sentence that means the voice of the raison and the truth: “I know Will Mayes. Will Mayes never done it.”

PART II. THE RACE. Minnie Cooper

This part is a long description in a third person about Minnie Cooper, the “white woman”, She is almost forty years old, unmarried, without occupations and any intellectual interests. She lives with her mother and her aunt.

Minnie’s life is idle and full of empty days, but it’s also full of mystery, rumour and gossip. She chooses to distance herself from the social events she used to go when she was young.

Every paragraph begins with the feminine pronoun “she”, but nearly at the end, there is a paragraph that begins with the masculine “he” that introduces her relationship with the widower. This relationship stirs controversies; when Minnie is together with the widower, the town began to say “poor Minnie,” and she becomes a topic of two public opinions, with some people pitying her and other people accusing her of adultery.

Part III. THE POWER OF THE VIOLENCE.

It’s the most important section because it uncovers the truth: the group of white men show the injustice and real racism to the “niggers”. It is a vindictive act because they decided to murder the innocent black man, but the very act of killing is not explained in the story.

Like the first part, after a short description presenting the barber walking alone in a dry and oppressive atmosphere, there is another long dialogue where we know that McLendon, who seeks violence everywhere, and the three other men, who want revenge, decide to carry out a hate crime.

The group of white men decide to look for Will, they find him and take from the factory where he is working as a night watchman, and he is killed with violence. The real crime is done.

At the beginning McLendon’s group think that Hawkshaw has changed his mind and has come to join the revenge, but he continues trying to convince them to stop the crime. Again, the barber will try to repeat his opinion about the innocence of Will Mayes, but in vain. Is his behaviour a coward one?

Part IV. RETURNING TO THE DAILY LIFE: Minnie Cooper

This is a short part where there is a new description of the daily life of Minnie. It’s Saturday night and she is preparing to go downtown with her friends. But we notice her loneliness, her unhappy life. Now we got familiar with Miss Minnie’s history and we can see an inside view of her emotional state and her own sexual frustration. At the end, their friends examining her grey hair is a sign of sadness.

Part V. THE ENDING. THE MESSAGE

The protagonist is McLendon. Now there is a short glimpse of McLendon’s home life and his cruelty and tyranny over his wife. When he returns home, he’s still got the same deep violence, hate and rage.

You will notice that no section is dedicated to Will Mayes, the victim. And along the story, he only speaks a few moments.

CONCLUSION: I want to highlight some aspects:

Style: Some words are repeated several times “bloody”, “dust”, “dry”, “rainless”, associated with the weather. And also, there are some words in slang as “durn”.

Themes: The truth will not win because it is clear that they will never be punished for it.

This story describes the racial segregation (“equal but separate” politics) at the time. Faulkner wants to write about the relationship, the prejudices and the problems between black and white people.

Nowadays, in the 21st century, the relevance of this problem is still relevant, and not only in the USA.


QUESTIONS


Who was Minnie Cooper? What was she like? What did she look like?

Describe the barber's personality.

What kind of person was Will Mayes?

Talk about Maclendon.

The name of the village is Jefferson; it's fictious. But do you know anything about Thomas Jefferson? Do you think there is a relation between this man's name and the village's name?

Why do you think the drummer went with the gang?

And what about the barber? Why did he go too?

What did the narrator mean with "the air had a metallic taste"?

What is "snobbery"? What is for you the best definition of "snob"? Can you give examples?

What does it mean: "the pleasure of snobbery - male - retaliation - female? Is this a cliché?

Who was the cashier in the bank and what was his relation with Minnie?

Do you think the weather, or the climate, can influence the people's behaviour or character? Or is it only a cliché?

How does the image of the moon increase the tension in the story?

Why did the barber strike Will inside the car? Do you think it is always possible to keep one's control?

How did the barber get out of the car?

What happened to Will?

What was the Spanish word for "little trip"?

What did Minnie do on Saturday evening?

Tell us about Maclendon's way with his wife.

VOCABULARY

aftermath, frothy, drummer, (poises on) the balls of his feet, rove, prone, lief, riled, sallow, unflagging, frame house, haggle, haggard, runabout (car), over-the-way, paired, serried, twice-waxed moon, nimbused, rutted, ridge, running board, brick kiln, vat, tingle, welled


I Want to Know Why, by Sherwood Anderson



BIOGRAPHY

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio.

He was the third of seven children. His mother died in 1895 and his father had started to disappear for weeks, and Sherwood took a number of jobs to support his family. Anderson's talent for selling was evident, he was very successful in this type of business.

In 1898, he signed up for the United States Army, and his company was sent to the war in Cuba. He met Cornelia Pratt, the daughter of a wealthy Ohio businessman, they were married and had three children, and he ran a number of businesses.

In November 1912, Anderson had a mental breakdown, he left his wife and their three children and decided to become a creative writer. He divorced Cornelia in 1916; later he got married to Mitchel, they divorced, and he got married again to Elizabeth; they divorced in 1932 he got married again to Eleanor Copenhaver.

In 1916, Anderson's first book, Windy Mc Pherson's Son, was released in 1916, and Anderson's most famous book, Winesburg, Ohio, was released in 1919. In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, where he explored the new sexual freedom. Dark Laughter appeared in 1925, and it was his only bestseller.

Anderson died in Panama in 1941 during a cruise to South America. He was buried in Marion, Virginia. The writing on his gravestone reads "Life, Not Death, is the Great Adventure".


ANALYSIS

In Beckersville, county of Kentucky, there lived a 15-year-old boy, who loved race horses. He sensed that a horse was going to win the race because, when he noticed it, it was difficult for him to swallow and his throat hurt. He was so excited about the horse racing environment, that every morning he would go to Ed Becker's stable to watch the horses training.

At the time of horse racing in Beckersville they only talked about horses, new foals, jockeys, races in Lexington, Louisville, Saratoga, etc...

This boy and three friends ran away from home to watch the great Mulford Handicap horse race in Saratoga.

In this race, the Sunstreak horse ran; it was one of those horses that caused a sore throat to the boy from Beckersville and was trained and ridden by Jerry Tillfort, a rider whom the boy admired for how well he treated the horse and how professional he was.

As expected, Sunstreak won the race. At night, the boy followed Jerry Tillford and his drunken friends to a farm where there were women with a bad reputation. There he saw his idol Tillford kissing one of them and saying that the race had been won by him and not by the horse.

So, the boy asks himself the question "I Want to Know Why" a man so good at horses could kiss a woman so bad.

I really liked the description

-first, of the hobby, enthusiasm and delusion for a certain event or job.

-second, of an important event that takes place in a certain location,

-and third, of the disappointment that a boy has when his idol lets him down.
 

QUESTIONS

Nigger is an offensive word. So, what do you call a person who is black? What do you call foreign people?
What are black people good at (according to the story)? What a black person (nigger in the story) would do and what wouldn’t he do?
Describe Bildad Johnson.
Do you know more clichés about black people or about different social groups?
“I wish I was a nigger”. Did you ever wish to be another person or to have another nationality or belong to another social group?
How far is Beckersville from Saratoga Springs? Explain their trip.
Talk about these characters:
--The protagonist
--The protagonist’s father
--Henry Rieback
--Henry Rieback’s father
Harry Hellinfinger’s jokes: can you explain them?
How does the narrator know when a horse is going to win? Do you have this kind of intuition for something, or do you know anybody who does?
Who’s Jerry Tillford?
What is the best smell in the world, according to the narrator? And for you?
Tell us about Sunstreak.
Describe the rummy looking farmhouse.
What happened when Jerry and his friends arrived at the rummy farmhouse? And when they were inside the house?
What do the protagonist and Jerry have in common?
What do you think or do when a person you hate (or you don’t like) love the same things as you? What are your feelings?


VOCABULARY

freight train, (race) track, nigger, scratch around, wheedle, colt, outfit, livery barn, lay low, cut out, be nabbed, squeal, give you away, gambler, sheet writer, faro, thoroughbred, gimlet, stunted, spunk, gobble, lit out, plow, gelding, Sam Hill, post, sire, itch, jawed, paddock, bugle, untrack, stallion, plunk, skin, rummy, fantods, homely, brag, 


Never, by H. E. Bates


Summary

 

H. E. Bates, Never, by Elisa Sola

 

BIOGRAPHY

Herbert Ernest Bates was born on the 16th of May, 1905 (nineteen o five), in Rushden, Northamptonshire. Therefore, he was an English author.

His grandfather Charles Lucas was a shoemaker and led Herbert to walk around the countryside, and this is where he learnt to appreciate the plants and wildlife of the area of North Bedfordshire, where his grandmother's family came from. In fact, many of his stories describe life in rural areas of England.

He was educated at Ketting Grammar School, where he enjoyed football and athletics. His English teacher there was Edmund Kirby, who was to influence his studies of literature and poetry. He left school at sixteen and became a junior reporter in the Northampton Chronicle, but he hated his job. Then he took a job as a clerk for a leather merchant and it was there where he wrote his first novel The Two Sisters, when he was merely twenty years old. in 1925, when he was 21 years old, he found a company willing to publish this book.

In 1931 he married Marjorie Hellen and they moved to Little Chest, in Kent. There they bought a granary which they converted in a beautiful garden. In this environment he could write and quickly gained a reputation for writing stories about country ways.

During World War II he continued writing stories, alongside with his duties in the RAF, under the pseudonym of "Flying Officer X". In some of his stories, he wrote about several people who were identifiable to the locals. In fact, he dedicated several of his books to the people who had influenced his life: the character Uncle Silas (in a series of stories) is his great uncle Joseph Betts. Another famous character was Sam Smith, who was a friend whom he had learnt about poaching (stealing game).

Marjorie and Herbert had four children: Ann, Judith, Richard and Jonathan who were grown with the same love for nature. Herbert wrote also a book about gardening and an autobiography.

H.E. Bates died in 1974, aged 68, after a serious illness, but his greatest success came after his death, when his son Richard produced a television series based on the Pop Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May, and its sequels as well as adaptations of My Uncle Silas, A Moment in Time, Fair Stood the Wind for France, and Love for Lydia.

H. E. Bates has a road named after him in his town of Rushden.

 

NEVER


In the short story “Never” by H. E. Bates, a teenage girl by the name of Nellie decides that she wants to leave home, because her life is monotonous, but in reality, she doesn’t want to leave, or she can't leave.

The author describes a shading landscape and a depressed mood of the girl. All the elements in the story are chosen to recreate a sad and depressing atmosphere. Everything suggests that the girl is suffering from a mental illness. I think that she has a depression. Even at one point of the story she acknowledges that she isn’t well: "I hate everyone. I've changed until I hardly know myself". Some elements used by the author to create this atmosphere are:

1. The constant hesitation: "what shall I take? The blue dress with the rosette? What else? What else" / "Should she go to Elden or Olde?"

2. The repetition: "It was all confused. It was all confused" (she is confused and the landscape is confused too (clouds, half-dark room) / "I'm going away, I'm going away (she had said hundred times during the afternoon)", "She counted the money a dozen times", he moved her fingers anxiously.

3. The obsessive tune of the waltz in her mind, with the train schedule: "Elden 6.13, Olde 6.18"... The domestic sound of the tea cups reveals us the routine that she hates.

4. The cold throughout the story and the heat at the climax, when she thinks that she is about to leave. In the beginning she is in a drowsy, half-dark room, a sunset, with great clouds across the sky. We imagine a cold atmosphere. In the middle of the story, at the climax, she "felt warm", her breast rises and falls, her body felt a light thrill and she wishes she had no more fear, but in the end cold returns: "she felt cold... It was cold."

4. The weight: In the beginning her luggage is light, but after her euphoria, the luggage is heavy.

5. The light: The story begins in a "drowsy, half-dark room" (it was afternoon) and ends in the same "drowsy room", but "absolutely dark" (it was black night), like the future of the girl. The last words of the story "Some day! Some day!", are in contrast with the title: Never! From this point of view, it's a circular story.

With all these sensory elements: light, height, temperature, sound..., the author creates an atmosphere of deep discomfort. The familiar environment of the girl is also negative because her father is moaning about his lack of luck, and her routines are empty of excitement or energy. She acts only to fill up the day.

Faced with this, the girl wants to break this dynamic, but she is so afraid that she is unable to take the step in order to change her life.

Many people had dreamed of some new exciting adventures, new experiences, something very different from the same old existence. Some of them take this step, others are still questioning whether they're ready for it, and finally, others give it up. 

QUESTIONS

Describe the protagonist: age, interests, personality

What is the meaning of “sat in a heap”?

Talk about her family.

Why do you think she wants to go away?

What’s her biggest worry about going away?

What are her daily routines?

What things did she put in her bag to go away?

What is Elden 6.13 and Olde 6.18?

Where can you find the rhythm of a waltz in Elden 6.13 and in Olde 6.18?

What will be the best moment (day, week, year) to run away? Why?

There’s a big ellipsis of time in the story. What ellipsis is this one and why?

When she packed her things the bag “was not heavy” (page 392, line 17), but then it “grew heavy” (page 393, line 24). What is your opinion about this change?

Did she really want to go? How do you know?

Why the “red ring” was mocking her?

What weather elements pictured her disappointment?

Do you think she even went out of the house? Why?

What is a rite of passage? What rites of passage do you know?

Tell us about any “rite of passage” (yours, your children...) or any anecdote, any moment you remember of your adolescence, something that was decisive in your life.


VOCABULARY

guide, rotten, rosette, mending, hand, ace, trump, mournful, utter, prattle, strum, thrill, bottom G, flat, fitful