This farcical comedy by Heinrich Böll can be looked at from two perspectives. The first is as a Christmas satire. After years of austere Christmases during World War II, the wife of a German businessman becomes hysterical when the tree for the traditional lavish family Christmas of 1946 is taken down. To prevent her being institutionalized, her family agree to re-celebrate Christmas Eve every day of the year. They go to ridiculous lengths to do this, destroying family unity in the process. Themes: family, tradition, mental illness, alienation, dehumanization, commercialization and loss of the spiritual meaning of Christmas, facing reality. More…
The Homecoming
This Chinese folktale retold by Laurence Yep is about a poor woodcutter who is easily distracted. He takes a keen interest in everyone’s business but his own, and has an annoying habit of giving advice, whether asked for or not, pointing out how people he meets could do things better. One day, he comes across two strange men playing Xiangqi (Chinese chess) in a forest, and can’t resist stopping to offer suggestions about their best next moves. In a Rip Van Winkle-like conclusion, he finds many changes on returning home, having been being missing for thousands of years More…
Initiation
In this story Sylvia Plath, a candidate declines membership of an elite high school sorority after successfully completing its demeaning initiation process. Her reasons for doing so reflect the major themes of the story: friendship (fear of being distanced from a friend) and identity (conformity vs. individuality). She visualizes the sorority as being like a flock of sparrows, one like the other, all exactly alike. Her decision is strengthened by imagining herself as a mythical “heather bird”, strong and proud in their freedom and their sometime loneliness. Other themes include hazing, isolation vs. social acceptance, human connection, personal growth. More…
The Way It Felt to Be Falling
The major theme of this story by Kim Edwards is fear. For the nineteen-year-old-protagonist working to save money for college, the principal fear is losing her mind like her father. Her life revolves around work, helping her overwrought mother with her home cake-decorating business, and hanging out with her mentally unstable boyfriend. When the boyfriend talks her into going skydiving, she faces an even greater fear: death. Her exhilaration over confronting this fear and making the jump help displace her other fears and turn her life around. Other themes include responsibility, loneliness, mental illness, substance abuse, shame, freedom. More…
That in Aleppo Once…
The title of this Vladimir Nabokov story is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello. Several characters reflect those in the famous play, and it shares the same major theme (jealousy). The story is more than the tale of a deceitful, adulterous wife who may have only married the older narrator to escape the German occupation. The narrator’s heartbreak has caused him to question not only his wife’s existence, but also whether life is worth living. His letter is an attempt to unburden himself, and create some hope for the future. Other themes: escape, betrayal, deception, uncertainty, suicide (implied by the title). More…