The Idiot

Author: Arnold Bennett (English 1867-1931)
Published: 1905
Category: society
Text: Read Book Online

Summary:
A young man, on discovering his fiancée has left him, commits suicide with the help of the village idiot.

Analysis:
This story is somewhat deceiving in its simplicity. It is an example of the Classical Greek Unities as described by Aristotle in that it occurs in one place (the Queen's Arms at Moorthorne), over a short period of time (a few hours), and involves one incident (a suicide).

The title implies the story involves an idiot and there is an idiot in the story; the village idiot, Daft Jimmy

"Someone had told him [Daft Jimmy] the ancient story of the fool and his boots, and, with the pride of an idiot in his idiocy, he had determined that it should be related of himself."

I'm not sure which "ancient story" Bennett is referring to but the above statement appears to be telling us that this particular idiot is not the titular idiot.

Another candidate for the idiot is the protagonist himself, William Froyle; suicide may be viewed as an idiotic thing to do; however, on closer reading, we can find clues to a third, and perhaps bigger idiot than both Daft Jimmy and William Froyle combined, namely, the society they live in. 

William Froyle, we are told "... was a man about thirty years of age, with a serious and thoughtful, rather heavy countenance." who "commanded and received respect" from the whole village where "He was known for a scholar..."  and, as such, had been given "the proud position of secretary to the provident society styled the Queen's Arms Slate Club" yet we are also told that "...everyone wondered that so sedate and sagacious a man should have seen in Susie a suitable mate."  and that William, the scholar, did not fully understand the meaning of the word "nominee", and that he looked with disdain on the Chairman of the Queen's Arm Slate Club because the man had "signed the [club] rules without the use of capitals."  

So William had evinced poor judgment in selecting his fiancée, was somewhat dense when it came to understanding language and looked with disdain on those having authority over him.  Given all these shortcomings, one might wonder at the level of intelligence in the village of Moorthorne, after all, they had claimed him to be wise. Perhaps they could learn from Daft Jimmy, who came to his senses about his boot size:

'Them shoes!' the idiot ejaculated suddenly. 'Well, I be an idiot, and that's true! They can take the measure from my feet, and I never thought on it till this minute!'

Could it be that the villagers took the measure of William Froyle from the measure of their own intelligence and so they are really The Idiot referred to in the title?


Notes:

Bennett did a few other interesting things in the story with respect to the suicide itself. He tells us of an impending calamity "He [William] felt suddenly the near approach of a frightful calamity..." . The fiancée's surname is Trimmer, reminding one of the phrase "trimming one's sails" , something is to be curtailed. And then, in the lead up to the suicide itself, he uses language that evokes hangings: legs dangling, weighted chains, a little hanging cupboard, the hanging lamp. 

There is also Bennett's choice of the surname Froyle.  Froyle sounds like foil, while there is a town of Froyle also known as The Village of the Saints so William Froyle may be acting as a foil to a joke about village saints.


This story is recommended as a reading exercise in A Handbook on Story Writing by Blanche Colton Williams, 1917, p18.

The Overcoat

Author:  Nikolai Gogol (Ukrainian, 1809-1852)
Published: 1842
Category: Society
Text: Classic Reader

Summary:
An impoverished clerk spends his life savings on a new overcoat which is subsequently stolen; when his appeals to authority, for justice, prove futile, he dies of grief and cold. Shortly after the city is haunted by an apparition who steals the coats off people's backs.

Analysis:
In this story Gogol makes fun of minor officials and the insignificant in Russian society; although he manages to inject a sense of feeling for both. In speaking of the petty authority who scared the wits out of the protagonist, Akakiy, he tells us

"Suffering was unpleasant to him, for his heart was accessible to many good impulses, in spite of the fact that his rank often prevented his showing his true self."

And of the men the protagonist worked with, most of whom were inclined to make fun of him, there was at least one who was not so harsh.

"There was in it something which moved to pity; so much that one young man, a new-comer, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of Akakiy, suddenly stopped short, as though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented itself in a different aspect."

And in the tailor, Petrovitch, who makes the new overcoat, we are shown that even the down-trodden take pride in their work and aspire to greater things, if only they could be given the opportunity.

"Taking out the cloak, he gazed proudly at it, held it up with both hands, and flung it skilfully over the shoulders of Akakiy Akakievitch....Petrovitch did not neglect to observe that it was only because he lived in a narrow street, and had no signboard, and had known Akakiy Akakievitch so long, that he had made it so cheaply; but that if he had been in business on the Nevsky Prospect, he would have charged seventy-five rubles for the making alone."

But throughout there is the overriding Russian sense of fate, of men being made what they are by their names and the  circumstances of their lives:

"His name was Akakiy Akakievitch. It may strike the reader as rather singular and far-fetched, but he may rest assured that it was by no means farfetched, and that the circumstances were such that it would have been impossible to give him any other."

And the only hope for a little justice comes after death.

"But the horror of the important personage transcended all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth open, and, with a terrible odour of the grave, gave vent to the following remarks: "Ah, here you are at last! I have you, that -- by the collar! I need your cloak; you took no trouble about mine, but reprimanded me; so now give up your own."

The Embassy of Cambodia

Author: Zadie Smith (English, 1975- )
Published: 2013
Category: Modern
Text: The New Yorker

Summary: The daily movements of a young African woman, working as a servant in a middle class London home, located on the same street as the Cambodian Embassy, are observed.

Analysis:
The opening line of the story, "Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody."  is a paraphrase of Monty Python's "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"  and immediately one gets a sense that something unappealing in English middle class life is about to be revealed; and we are not disappointed, because the next few lines place us firmly in a North London suburban street, only now its little villas, with their private swimming pools, are also occupied by Arabs and, of all things, the Embassy of Cambodia.

There are a number of themes running through the story: the heard but unseen badminton game, the stealthy swims, the all-knowing friend, the Western back-packers entering the embassy; all in support of an overriding theme of unsympathetic detachment. The whole story leaves one feeling we are back in elementary school, the teacher has pinned a picture of a young black woman sitting on the sidewalk, in the drizzling rain, surrounded by her few belongings packed into shopping bags at her feet, and it is our task to describe how she came to be there. And the story we create is full of reasons that absolve us of any need for sympathy or empathy.

The young woman is an interloper in our society, just as she uses guest passes to her employer's club, without their permission, she is here, on this street, in this place, without ours. Her situation is not our doing but the world's, whose values have crept in and displaced ours, just as the Arabs and the Cambodian Embassy have moved into our street and physically displaced our English neighbours . It is up to Fatou, the girl, to "make her own arrangements" and not be fatuous about it; is it our fault she doesn't know she is a slave? that she has rights?

And the irony is, Fatou and those like her, are as detached from us as we are from them; being totally unaware that they are as vital to our sustained life as Fatou's presence was to Asma's life the day the child swallowed a marble; for in the end, we are all, English or not, middle-class or working class, Arab or Cambodian; as gormless as the narrator.

The Garden Party

Author: Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand, 1888-1923)
Published: 1922
Category: Society
Text: Classic Reader

Summary:
The accidental death of a young husband and father is the seed that allows the illusion of class distinction to take root and grow in the fertile ground of a young girl's mind.


Analysis:
Mansfield deftly employs an array of metaphors: flowers, hats, food, topography, and technology to describe a gradual change in a young girl's, Laura's, view of the people and events that fill her life on a day when "Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold"; implying the girl's changed view will be the result of an illusion created by a golden veil thrown over her head to turn her clear (true blue) vision hazy.

The story's title, "The Garden Party", itself, suggests a lovely summer's day of innocent pleasures while at the same time reminding us of the Garden of Eden and the possible loss of innocence as well as an indulgence in pleasures that may be sins. The idea of supplanted innocence is reinforced in the first paragraph where we are told

The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.

Daisies, white spring flowers often associated with children and innocence, have been replaced with "dark flat rosettes". Later in the story we find that fake gold daisies decorate the brim of a hat given to Laura by her mother; not a "sweet hat" like the one her friend Kitty "wore on Sunday" but a "black hat" that made Laura look "Spanish", "striking" and "stunning" and directed her thoughts away from others

Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper. 

and onto herself "Never had she imagined she could look like that."  Her new hat induces new thinking. The man's death, which took place "just outside the front gate", and his family's grief, which she first viewed as personal, "they're nearly neighbours", are now seen impersonally "like a picture in a newspaper." In fact, the whole impoverished community is now unreal to her, they are like the old woman with "her feet on a newspaper."; they no longer tread on common ground. Laura, her family, the garden, occupy the top of the hill, the dead carter, his family, neighbours and "cabbage" patches, the bottom. She does not bring them the "bread and butter" she nourished herself on at breakfast but the "fancy cream puffs" she indulged in later; filled with a "whipping cream" that induces an "absorbed inward look".

Instinctively recognizing her new view as false, "if only it was another hat", Laura blurts out "Forgive my hat", knowing she is no longer capable of putting it aside.  As she re-climbs the hill, her brother emerges from the shadows and asks if she was crying "Laura shook her head. She was."  She has learned to lie.

The Shoemaker and the Devil

Author: Anton Chekhov (Russian, 1860 - 1904)
Published: 1888
Category: Fantasy
Text: Classic Reader

Summary:
The devil fulfils a poor cobbler's wish to be a wealthy gentleman.

Points of interest:
There is a feeling of unrelieved grumpiness affecting all the characters, and the story itself. Not sure if this was what Chekov intended given his closing sentence:

"...and there was nothing in life for which one would give the devil even a tiny scrap of one's soul."

Haven't read enough of his work to get a feel for his religious opinions; in this story Fydor, the cobbler, notes, while in church, that "In church the same honor is done to rich and poor alike." He makes no comment on how the church deals with different states of the soul although it is implied that sinners go to hell. Or perhaps this is the whole point; there is nothing in life of equal value to the soul, nothing  worth the risk of an eternity in hell. Yet you get the definite sense, from the story, that this fact leaves everyone, rich and poor alike, dissatisfied with their situation in  life.