The Man in the Well

In this story by Ira Sher, a group of children find a man trapped in a well and reach an unspoken agreement to leave him there. Readers are left with three questions: 1) How/why did the man end up in the well? 2) Why wouldn’t he give the children his name? and 3) Why didn’t the children get help? The first question is of interest, but doesn’t affect the story. The second question begs another: Would the outcome have been different if the man had given his name? The third suggests a major theme: insensitivity to the suffering of others.

Original Text / PDF / Audio (2,500 words)

An interesting piece of by-play in the story is the possible involvement of the narrator’s parents in causing the man to be in the well. At the beginning of the second paragraph, the narrator suggests that he/she has since learnt something unsavory about the man: I think it’s important that we decided not to help him. Later, the narrator writes that on the second morning after finding the man: My mother was very upset with something at the time. I could hear her weeping at night in her room downstairs, and the stubborn murmur of my father. There was a feeling to those days, months actually, that I can’t describe without resorting to the man in the well, as if through a great whispering, like a gathering of clouds, or the long sound, the turbulent wreck of the ocean.

Some commentators suggest that the story’s major theme is how cruel children can be without supervision and boundaries. Sher’s casting of the narrator (and presumably the other children) as being around nine years old puts this in doubt. Most children are unable to think conceptually until their teen years. Those in the story would probably have treated their initial interactions with the man as a new kind of game, and not considered the consequences of what they were doing until it was too late. This explains why they were able to reach a consensus without speaking: Everyone, like myself, was probably on the verge of fetching a rope, or asking where we could find a ladder, but then we looked around at each other and it was decided.

An important theme is the role of identity in dealing with others. At first, the children hold all the power; the man is at their mercy. This changes when the man learns and starts to use their names. The children are no longer anonymous; he knows who they are and has them in his power. Ironically, this probably cost the man his life because it signalled “game over” for the children. An interesting question is why the man refused to give the children a name (real or imagined) to call him by. The children may have been more disposed to help if they could identify with him as a person as opposed to a faceless voice in the dark.

For me, the major theme of the story is insensitivity to the suffering of others. In this context, the Man in the Well is a symbol for all the other nameless people in the world who are desperate for food and/or shelter. Like the children, we throw them a few scraps (of aid) without doing anything to help them out of the deep hole they find themselves in.