Sophomore English – World Lit Short Stories – Part II – Study Guide –

“Rhinoceros” by Eugene Ionesco (France/Romania)

Subject Matter: political upheaval, social change/disruption, social conformity/non-conformity, irrational behavior, crowd dynamics, “group-think,” collective psychosis, rhinos, savagery/brutality, fascism, rationality, humanism, public opinion, majorities and minorities

Setting: France, 1930s

Characters:  Narrator, Jean, Daisy (typist), Emile Dudard (chief jurist), Botard (archivist), Madame Boeuf,

Key Plot Details:  café, rhinoceros-on-the-loose, market stalls, housewife’s basket, tiresome paradoxes, Sundays, promise to give up drinking, woman with injured cat, argument about Asian and African rhinos, Madame Boeuf faints, fire brigade, logicians becomes a rhinoceros, mutations, narrator’s too-white body

Important Dialogue/Description: “Perhaps it has escaped from the zoo…” – “Perhaps it belongs to the circus…” – “All cats are mortal.” – “I’ve not seen it and I don’t believe it.” – “Collective psychosis, just like religion, the opium of the people.” – “I believe in flying saucers, myself.” – “What’s the matter with your skin? It’s like leather…” –  “Humanism is out of date!” – “I’ll trample on you! I’ll trample on you!” –  “Perhaps after all it’s we who need saving. Perhaps we are the abnormal ones. Do you see anyone else like us?” – “I’m rather ashamed of what you call love, that morbid thing….It cannot compare with the extraordinary energy displayed by all these beings we see around us.” – “We ought to try to interpret their psychology, to learn their language.” – “The only way out is to convince them. But of what? Were these mutations reversible?” – “They’re still in the minority, however…That won’t last long.” –  “Listen to me Daisy. We shall have children, and then they will have children. It’ll take time, but between us we can regenerate humanity.” – “Alas, I would never become a rhinoceros. I could never change.”

Plot Summary: When people begin turning into rhinoceroses, the narrator and his friend Daisy vow to resist the transformation. But as the rhino herds begin to outnumber humans, Daisy is unable to resist the pressure to conform. Eventually the narrator is the only human left. Though he now finds his humanity odd and distasteful, he cannot bring himself to abandon it.

Possible Themes/Motifs: Beware of the “group-think” mentality. The majority is always wrong. The sleep of reason breeds monsters. Dare to be different. Unthinking conformity is akin to insanity.

“Black Girl” by Sembene Ousmane (Senegal)

Subject Matter: French colonialism, class divisions, racial divisions, job opportunities, dreams/aspirations, vacations, servitude, isolation, disappointment/despair, suicide

Setting: France/Algeria, 1950s

Characters: Diouana, Madame Pouchet, Mademoiselle Dubois, Samba, Tive Corra (the old sailor)

Key Plot Details: two women hunched together – crying, locked bathroom, coroner, born in 1927, Tive Correa’s inebriety (drunkenness), angry Samba hits Diouana, Tive Correa’s advice, Madame Pouchet accuses Diouana of lying, dirty, locked bathroom, cut throat

Important Dialogue/Description: “Which pane did you break?” –  “According to her passport, she was born in 1927.” – “Why do you think it was suicide?” – “Viye Madame.”- “You’re not going to tell me at the last moment, on this very day, that you’re leaving us in the lurch?” – “That hurt.” -“Did you give Monsieur your identity card?” – “I, whom you see this way, ruin though I am today, I know France better than you do.” – “What young African doesn’t dream of going to France? Unfortunately, they confuse living in France with being a servant in France…In my country, Casamance, we say that darkness pursues the moth.” – “You are dirty in spite of everything. You might have left the bathroom clean.” – “I don’t like liars and you are a liar.” – “Homesick African Girl Cuts Throat in Antibes.”

Plot Summary: A young Senegalese maid accept her employers’ offer to return with them to France. An old sailor warns her not to go, because young mistakenly Africans think that going to France will increase their opportunities for success. Diouana however wants to pursue her dream. In France she becomes increasingly withdrawn and resentful as she finds herself overworked and isolated by prejudice. When Madame Pouchet accuses her of lying, Diouana locks herself in a bathroom and commits suicide.

Themes/Motifs: Be careful what you wish for – it may not turn out the way you planned.  Isolation is the first symptom of despair. Dreams may sometimes turn into nightmares.. No one else sees your suffering.

“No Witchcraft for Sale” by Doris Lessing (Zimbabwe/Rhodesia)

Subject Matter: colonialism, racial attitudes, class divisions, snake bites, injuries, medicine, folk remedies, cultural legacies/secrets,  religion, modern science

Setting: Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), 1950s

Characters: the Farquars, Teddy, Gideon

Key Plot Details: “Little Yellow Head” Teddy (only child), Teddy’s scooter,  Gideon’s youngest son – “Piccanin,” – Teddy’s eye injury (fists to his eyes); snake venom, Gideon’s magic root, cure, scientist, long trek into the veld, blue flowers, Gideon – the son of a famous medicine man

Important Dialogue/Description:  “Ah, missus, these are both children, and one will grow up to be a baas (boss) and one will be a servant.” – “Picannin – get out of my way!” – “He’s only a black boy.” –  “Wait a minute, missus, I’ll get some medicine.” – “His eyes will get better.” – “Gideon, God chose you as an instrument of his goodness.” – “…while all of them knew that in the bush of Africa are waiting valuable drugs locked in bark, in simple-looking leaves, in roots, it was impossible to ever get the truth about them from the natives themselves.” – “Nonsense…these things get exaggerated in the telling. We are always checking up on this kind of story, and we draw a blank every time.” –   “I will show you the root.” –  “But I did show you, missus, have you forgotten?” – “You old rascal, Gideon, Do you remember that time you tricked us all by making us walk milees all over the veld for nothing?”  – “Ah Little Yellow Head, how you have grown! Soon you will be grown-up with a farm of your own…”

Plot Summary: The Farquars feel close to Gideon, their black cook, who shares their Christian beliefs and loves their son Teddy. When a tree snake spits venom into the child’s eyes, Gideon uses a plant to save the child’s sight. But when a scientist visits to learn about the miraculous plant, Gideon reacts as if the Farquars have betrayed him and refuses to cooperate.

Themes/Motifs:  Not everything that belongs to a person can be shared with others. Always protect the source of your power. Secrets are only valuable when they remain secret. Some things cannot be given over to modern science. Cultural integrity demands cultural privacy.

“The Moment before the Gun Went Off” by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

Subject Matter: legacy of apartheid, racial divisions, trucks, kudu (antelope) hunting, terrible gun accidents, public opinion, publicity, perception and misperception, father and son dynamics

Setting: South Africa, 1970s? 1980s?

Characters: Marais Van der Vyver, Lucas, Van der Vyver’s wife, Alida

Key Plot Details:  Van der Vyver left his house at 3:00 p.m., herd of kudu (antelope), rifle with .300 ammunition, Lucas standing up in the back of the truck, pot-hole, gun goes off, agitators/protests, newpaper clippings, police station burning, Lucas was Vand der Vyver’s son

Important Dialogue/Description: “…that when Van der Vyver is quoted saying he is ‘terribly shocked,’ he will ‘look after the wife and children,’ none of those Americans and English, and none of those people at home who want to destroy the white man’s power will believe him.” –  “Because nothing the government can do will appease the agitators and the whites who encourage them. Nothing satisfies them, in the cities: blacks can sit and drink in white hotels, now the Immorality Act has gone, blacks can sleep with whites…It’s not even a crime any more.” – “The parents hold her [the mother of Lucas] as if she were a prisoner or a crazy woman to be restrained. But she says nothing, does nothing.”  “How will they ever know, when they file newspaper clippings, evidence, proof, when they look at the photographs and see his face- guilty! Guilty! They are right! – how will they know, when the police stations burn will all the evidence of what has happened now, and what the law made a crime in the past.” –  “How could they know that they do not know. Anything.” – “The young black callously shot through the negligence of the white man was not the farmer’s boy; he was his son.”

Plot Summary:  A young black man dies when his employer’s gun accidentally discharges. The narrator says that people will misunderstand the incident as another example of white South Africans’ brutality toward blacks. Gradually, the reader learns that Marais Van der Vyver grieves not just because he has caused a death but because the dead man was his illegitimate son.

Themes/Motifs: People looking from a distance cannot understand a situation. The personal is the political. All politics is local. Dividing the world into “black” and “white” is dangerously simplistic.

“The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses” Bessie Head (South Africa)

Subject Matter:  prison, harsh conditions, bosses, authority figures, leaders and followers, group dynamics, group solidarity, collusion, theft, cooperation, race relations

Setting: South Africa, 1960s? 1970s? 1980s?

Characters: Brille, Warder Hannetjie, prisoners of Span One

Key Plot Details: Span One, Brille’s glasses, Brille’s thin frame and knobbly knees, the new warder: Hannetjie, dropped cabbage, knobkerrie club, Brille’s twelve children fighting each other, bogeyman, tobacco, isolation tank,  five bags of fertilizer, jacket, tirade from the chief prison official, Hennetjie digging/working alongside Span One, stealing commodities

Important Dialogue/Description: “Who dropped that cabbage?” – “I don’t take orders from a kaffir!” – “I’m twenty years older than you.” – Never mind brother…what happens to one of us, happens to all.” – “I’ll try to make up for it, comrades…I’ll steal something so that you don’t go hungry.” – “Prison is an evil life…It makes a man contemplate all kinds of evil deeds.” – “One of these days we are going to run the country. You are going to clean my car. Now, I have a fifteen-year-old son, and I’d die of shame if you had to tell him that I ever called you Baas.” – “This thing between you and me must end. You may not know it, but I have a wife and children, and you’re driving me to suicide.” – “It’s not tobacco we want, but you…we want you on our side.”

Plot Summary: The black political prisoners in Span One have managed to intimidate all of their white jailers except Warder Hannetjie. The sharp-eyed newcomer makes their lives miserable until Brille catches him stealing fertilizer. Then the tables are turned until the warder asks for a truce. In exchange for humane treatment, Span One agrees to keep the warder’s secret; they even help him steal more fertilizer.

Themes/Motifs: Genuine authority is stronger than brute force. History rewards suffering for a just cause. The Zeitgeist  [spirit of the times] favors the underdog. Needless antagonisms will vanish over time. People with a common interest can actually work together.

“Another Evening at the Club” by Alifa Rifaat (Egypt)

Subject Matter: class divisions, men and women, husbands and wives, servants and masters, fear, guilt, freedom, security, luxury, privilege

Setting: Cairo, Egypt – 1960s? 1970s?

Characters:  Samia, Abboud Bey, Gazia

Key Plot Details: rocking chair, wide wooden verandah, dowry, coffee in Japanese cups, lighting father’s cigarette, Inspector of Irrigation, emerald ring, pat on the cheeks,  light-headed from drinking beer, lost ring, Gazia’s tears, call to the Inspector of Police, pat on both cheeks like a slap in the face, Samia’s uncontrollable trembling, dark shape of a boat, supper at the club, Samia smiling

Important Dialogue/Description: “Tell people you’re from the well-known Barakat family and that your father was a judge.” – “Where’s the ring?” – “May Allah blind me if I’ve set eyes on it.” – “You’ve got just 15 seconds to say where…or else I swear to you, you’re not going to have a good time of it.” – “I’ll leave the matter in your capable hands – I know your people have their ways and means.” – “I’m sorry. I can’t think how it could have happened. What do we do now?” – “Listen, there’s nothing to be done but to give it to me and the next time I go down to Cairo I’ll sell it and get something else in its place. We’d be the laughingstock of the town…”  – “For a moment she was on the point of protesting and in fact uttered a few words.”  – “… he bent over her and with both hands gently patted her on the cheeks. It was a gesture she had long become used to, a gesture that promised her continued security…” – “…now for the first time the gesture came like a slap in the face.” – “By the time she had turned round from the window she was smiling.”

Plot Summary: When an emerald ring is lost, Abboud Bey accuses not his wife Samia, but her maid, Gazia, of committing the theft. While the girl is being interrogated, Samia discovers the ring. She wants to clear the girl’s name, but her husband says that the girl will be released soon and that revealing the truth would expose them to ridicule. Samia reacts to his reassurances as if she has been slapped, but quickly realizes the benefits of being Bey’s spoiled, protected wife.

Themes/Motifs:  Don’t “sell” your integrity. Someone else must suffer so that I may prosper. Fear can lead to desperate forms of self-preservation. Sometimes (unfortunately) security is more important than freedom. Women pay dearly for the luxuries they crave. Women should not have to choose between “loyalty to men” and “loyalty toward other women.”

“The Happy Man” by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)

Subject Matter: happiness, mental health, medicine, psychiatry, coping (survival) strategies,  psychological attitudes (involvement vs. detachment), problems and difficulties, social ills, suffering, the price of caring, maintaining sanity in a troubled world

Setting: Egypt, 1970s

Characters: narrator, Uncle Bashir (servant), narrator’s rival, doctor of internal medicine, nerve specialist (doctor), gland specialist (doctor), psychiatrist

Key Plot Details:  waking up happy, breakfast, newspaper building, narrator’s rival, engineer son in Canada, Racism, Vietnam, Palestine (current events/problems), “tyrannical happiness,”  “the sound of his own guffaws [smiles],” “parade of bloody tragedies”, memories of unhappy times, wife’s death, narrator’s insomnia,  examination room, visits to internal medicine specialist, nerve specialist, gland specialist, psychiatrist

Important Dialogue/Description: “You get angry a lot and have fierce arguments with your neighbors.” – “You’ve changed a great deal overnight.” – “So then, you think it’s necessary to be able to take a balanced view of events.” – “It was a tyrcannical happiness, despising all misery and laughing at any hardship; it wanted to laugh, dance, sing, and distribute its spirit of laughter, dancing and singing among the various problems of the world.” –  “It’s an incredible feeling which can’t be defined in any other way, but it’s very serious.” – “I’ve twice as much to worry about as I have to make me feel glad.” – “Consult a gland specialist!” – “The truth is, Doctor, that I ‘ve come to see you because I’m happy!” – “You’re a miracle!” – “Nothing like that. But I get a similar case in my clinic at least once a week!” -“But is it a disease?” – “All the cases are still under treatment.”

Plot Summary: A man wakes up feeling unnaturally happy. He stops arguing with people, is gracious to a rival, and accepts his son’s decision to live abroad. However, he can take nothing seriously, not the current problems of the world, not even the memories of his wife’s death. A psychiatrist says he is perfectly sane and that at least one new patient a week complains of a similar kind of “debilitating happiness.”

Themes/Motifs: Continuous happiness is not a natural condition for a human being. Personal happiness is not as important as empathy. Happiness is not authentic if it disconnects us from other people and their suffering.

“Saboteur” by Ha Jin (China)

Subject Matter: Communist ideology, China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), police force apparatus, political systems, conformity, non-conformity, corruption, injustice, crime,  punishment, freedom, disobedience, revenge

Setting: China, 1960s (during Cultural Revolution)

Characters: Mr. Chiu, his bride, the police, communist party members, donkey-faced officer, Fenjin

Key Plot Details: Muji Train station, two railroad policemen, tea, air that smells like rotten melon, Mr. Chiu’s hepatitis, Mr. Chiu’s liver, spilled hot tea, wet sandal,  Mr. Chiu’s injured fingers, police station, cleaver chopping rhythmically, Cultural Revolution (“all citizens were equal before the law”), lecturer at Harbin University,  Mr. Chiu’s harangue, witness statements, fever and chills, heart disease and hepatitis medication,  Fenjin the lawyer, Fenjin’s torture, “reactionary” crime, blue folder, going from restaurant to restaurant eating soup, Mr. Chiu’s jaundiced face, hepatitis epidemic

Important Dialogue/Description: “See you dumped tea on our feet.” – “You’re lying. You wet your shoes yourself.” – “Your man hit my fingers with a pistol.” – “Now you have to admit you are guilty.” – “What if I refuse to cooperate?” – “Then your lawyer will continue his education in the sunshine.” –  “….you don’t even have to write out your self-criticism (confession). We have your crime described clearly here. All we need is your signature.” – “After two days’ detention, I have realized the reactionary nature of my crime. From now on, I shall continue to educate myself with all my effort…” “It doesn’t matter. They are savages.” – “If only I could kill all the bastards!”

Plot Summary: When a policeman throws tea on his sandals, Mr. Chiu protests. He finds himself in jail, confronting false “eyewitness accounts” of how he caused a disturbance at the railway station. When his scholarly training prompts him to argue, he finds himself in jail without his hepatitis medicine. To get the police tot stop torturing his lawyer, he signs a prepared confession. Then, spreading hepatitis germs as widely as possible. Mr. Chiu becomes the saboteur the police had named him.

Themes/Motifs:  Political repression never succeeds. Those to whom evil is done [will] do evil in return. You must become the dragon to defeat the dragon. Oppression will unleash chaos and destruction.

“Tokyo” by Fumiko Hayashi (Japan)

Subject Matter: survival, wartime poverty, work, love, empathy, compassion, random acts of kindness, suffering and loss, appreciation, joy amid the ruins

Setting: Toyko, Japan, 1940s

Characters: Ryo, Tsuruishi, Ryukichi + Ryo’s missing husband

Key Plot Details: windy afternoon, rucksack, rusty iron, street vendors, Shizuoka tea for sale. stove fire, Shitaya district, Siberia, Amur River, cabin on the bomb site, Asakusa district, Goddess of Mercy, garish lantern, “Merry Teahouse,”  rain storm/downpour, movie theater,  small inn,  Ryo’s wet hair, two bowls of spaghetti, quilted bedrolls,  night spent at the inn, Ryo and Tsuru’s embrace, bomb site, Tsuruishi’s death,  delivery truck/iron bars,  accident on narrow bridge, sketchbook, pile of broken concrete, baseball cap, body of dead kitten, four sewing women around oil stove, busy needles, feeling of warmth

Important Dialogue/Description: “Tea for sale! Would you like some tea, please?” – “It’s all a matter of luck, you know! You’ll probably have a good day tomorrow.” –  “My husband’s still in Siberia. That’s why I have to work like this.” –  “I was in Siberia myself! I spent three years chopping wood near the Amur River.” – “I look after that iron out there and help load the trucks.” –  “I suppose people in this inn think we’re married.” – “War, always war!” –  “Ryo…Ryo.” – “It’s wrong you know…wrong to my husband…” – “Did that man die, Mamma?” – “He fell into a river.” –  “Don’t worry if you get pregnant…I’ll look after you whatever happens, Ryo.” – “Mamma, I want a sketchbook. You said I could have a sketchbook.” – “Come in and rest a while, if you like. I’ll see how much money we’ve got left. We may have enough for some tea.” –  “The women were like herself…as she watched their busy needles moving in and out of the material.” –   “A feeling of warmth came over her.”

Plot Summary: Ryo has not seen her husband, a prisoner of war in Siberia for six years. She supports herself and her child by selling tea. Ryo begins to think she might find happiness with a kind-hearted laborer, Tsuruishi, but he is killed in a freak accident. Stunned, Ryo decides to stay in Tokyo rather than return to the country. When four seamstresses let her rest by their fire, Ryo feels warmth again.

Themes/Motifs:  All things must pass. The wheel of fortune keeps turning for good or for ill. Life keeps handing us “surprises” whether we want them or not. Change is the only rule of life. Kindness and compassion can redeem/make up for the worst situations.