This touching short story from Daniel Keyes is about a mentally handicapped man who undergoes experimental surgery to enhance his intelligence. The operation’s initial success highlights an interesting aspect of intelligence: the very gifted can be as out of touch with reality and friendless as the intellectually challenged. The story raises an important issue: How far should medical science go in tampering with nature or, as some would say, the will of God? Perhaps the answer lies in Charlie’s ultimate fate, ironically going backwards in intelligence rather than forwards. Other themes include innocence, friendship, compassion, bullying and sacrifice. More…
Rules of the Game
The title of this story by Amy Tan refers to both the game of chess and the game of life. A Chinese-American mother’s term for one important rule is the art of invisible strength (self-control). The story deals with a number of themes: poverty, respect (for parents, others and one’s cultural heritage), pride vs. humility, passion and dedication, and mother/daughter relationships. At the end of the story, both fail in exercising the art of invisible strength. The mother’s understandable pride leads to bragging; the daughter’s response is rudeness and running away. Whose wind (willpower) will blow the strongest? More…
Axolotl
Julio Cortázar gives away the plot of this story in the first paragraph: There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls… Now I am an axolotl. The rest of the story talks about this Kafkaesque transformation, which is partial and may have only occurred in the protagonist’s mind. He (the axolotl part) sits in an aquarium tank watching himself (the unchanged part) looking in from the other side. Considering his life from this perspective seemingly builds the man’s self-esteem, and he no longer feels the need to return. Themes: loneliness, alienation, obsession, connection, enlightenment, inertia. More…
By the Waters of Babylon
Although published well before the atomic age, this story from Stephen Benét provides a remarkable description of a post-apocalyptic world devastated by weapons of mass destruction. Survivors lead a primitive existence. Modern religious beliefs have been replaced by reverence for the “gods” who built (and whose spirits still live in) destroyed buildings. Pointedly, elitism, prejudice and warfare still exist. Priests maintain their status by keeping healing and other knowledge to themselves, and there is constant fighting between the protagonist’s Hill People and the supposedly “ignorant” Forest People. Themes: superstition, destiny, search for knowledge, class, prejudice, warfare, danger of modern weaponry. More…
Swaddling Clothes
The major theme of Yukio Mishima’s Swaddling Clothes is the loss of traditional Japanese values to Western modernization. Other themes include class, morality, gender roles, compassion, fear, and sacrifice/atonement. The callous swaddling of an illegitimate baby in newspaper and protagonist Toshiko’s conviction that it is destined to grow up a poverty-stricken criminal underlines Japan’s rigid class structure. Her husband’s heartless description of the delivery demeans women who contravene social norms. When Toshiko does this (by taking a walk alone at night to contemplate her own child’s future and unsatisfying Western lifestyle), she comes face to face with her prophesy. More…