CONRAD THE SECRET SHARER

Conrad:  The Secret Sharer

(1)   Preliminary Notes

First,  don't be put off by the rather intricate grammar of the first paragraph.  The rest of the story is not written in that way.  We'll discuss why he uses such complicated sentence patterns.  Perhaps it's something to do with the narrator's loneliness.  Anyway, the main point at the opening, besides this complicated 'scene setting' is stated right at the end of this first paragraph when he says "And then I was left alone with my ship, anchored at the head of the Gulf of Siam."

Before we meet, would you, if you can:

·       Read Part 1 of the story

·       Find out something about Conrad’s life

·       Think about

o   What makes the Captain uncertain of himself

o   Why he identifies so closely with Leggatt

o   Why he helps him without really thinking about it

o   Think of any other stories The Secret Sharer reminds you of in any way

o   How this might be called a ‘psychological’ story. And if you can find out what a 'doppleganger' is.

Secret Sharer:  Thoughts about Part One

     The new captain is young and inexperienced and has suddenly been placed with a well tried crew who all knew each other, and in the middle of a voyage.  He is also younger than all the officers but one.  He’s a stranger, then.   He is confident in his sailing skills, but no in his ability to deal with men.  He feels they are laughing at him when he’s not there.    He’s just a  little too ‘nice’.   And to them he’s untested, so naturally, he thinks, they’ll be wondering if he knows his onions.

      He’s something of a solitary too, as can be seen by the way he stands alone on deck and looks at every detail of the dim land, the temple, the trees, the line of the shore, and so on.

Then suddenly he behaves very unconventionally by offering to do the night shift until five in the morning – something captains don’t normally do.   This decision can only increase the crew’s speculations about him.   It may look like trying to curry favour perhaps,  or perhaps it allows him to be alone with ‘his’ ship for the night and settle himself with her, as a sort of partner.

     His decision is decisive in,  by chance, allowing Leggatt to get secretly on board, and then be hidden in the Captain’s room.   His sudden meeting with Leggatt provides him with a ‘secret friend’, perhaps comfort as it’s someone who is not a crew member.      It’s this coincidence followed by hiding and secrecy that make some reader’s think that Leggatt is imaginary.  The Captains solitude and anxiety produce him, as it were.   His name could be connected with the word ‘legate’ which means a kind of deputy.

No reason is given why the Captain decides to help Leggatt and break the law by hiding an accused, now wanted, man.   He manages to place Leggatt in parts of his quarters where he will not be seen by visitors coming for orders, or to clean, or the captain of Leggatt’s ship.  

    The Captain continually sees Leggatt as a second self, a double, a doppelganger even.  This is emphasised by the sameness of their nightwear.     And yet Leggatt is a different kind of person from the Captain.  He is, it seems, quick tempered, impatient, and violent, qualities which lead to his unintended murder of a crewman.   Quite the opposite of the Captain who is uncertain, indeed timid.    So in what sense does he think of Leggatt as his double?   In short, what does Leggatt, mean to him?

      Already we have got the idea that the Captain is dealing, not just with a mysterious stranger,  but with his own lack of self-confidence as a commander of a ship.   The story shows him coming of age as an adult, acknowledging the inner fears, which rise up from the sea depths of his unconscious and must be confronted and overcome.    We talk of ‘facing’ and also of  ‘getting rid’ of our fears.  As the Captain,  in Part  Two will face and get rid of Leggatt.   But his relationship with Leggatt is more complex than dealing with inner weakness, because the Captain, although he will eventually ‘get rid’ of Leggatt, is also very much drawn to him as a fellow-stranger, as it were.

Week 6 Liphook

Thoughts on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

What is her Relation on ‘her Girls’?

·       They are alternative lives for her now she is past her prime?

·      They are a ‘sounding box’ by which she avoids self-knowledge?

·      She gives them the best sort of education:  questioning, even  she herself?

·      They express her need to protest, be different, challenge values?

·       The exemplify for her some loss, bitterness, sense of failure?  What?

·       Could we say each represents a part of her own mind:  lover, betrayer, victim. . . ?

·       Does she ‘abuse her power’ or not?

·       Suppose the Head were not such a narrow person?

Sandy looked back at her companions and understood them as a body with Miss Brodie for the head. She perceived herself, the absent Jenny, the ever-blamed Mary, Rose, Eunice, and Monica, all in a frightening little moment, in unified compliance to the destiny of Miss Brodie, as if God had willed them to birth for that purpose

Liphook: the communist

Week Three:  Liphook group, January 2016

On  The Communist

                                          by Richard Ford

I was moved by this story but somehow I don’t know quite how or why. It gave me several things to puzzle over.  Here are some of them.

·        Communist.   Is this a name he gives himself,  or that others give him?   In what sense is he a communist?   Communism doesn’t sit easily with shooting ducks (though perhaps it does with ‘poaching’).   Nor does it sit well with expensive cars like the ‘Nash’.   We get a sense of Ben as a sort of hippie but getting too old for the role -  outside mainstream society,  getting and spending as best he can.  Perhaps this is connected to his time in Vietnam?   He mentions shooting animals in Vietnam and Les speculates that he’d been thrown out for something he did there (again the assumption he’s an outsider).  Being a communist?  But he has been a trade unionist (‘labour man’) like Les’s father, and seems to believe in revolution  against the rich.  He says

“.  .  . the country was poisoned by the rich and strong men would need to bring it to life again.”

Or is his insecure life-style the result of his being known as a communist?  And also of being unable to adjust after Vietnam?    Again there’s a possibility that behind the individual character of Ben lies the paradox in communism – as it has so far been attempted – that an ideal ‘natural’ beauty of life somehow seems to end in even greater ugliness and death.

·        At the beginning of the story Aileen is on her own, and we’re not told what’s happened to Ben.   When he suddenly turns up she’s annoyed.  Perhaps she’s holding on to the remains of the quarrel which made him go?   Or angry at his leaving her?     She tries, in a very assertive way,  to stop Ben taking Les shooting.  But Les doesn’t allow himself to be dominated.    Perhaps Ben’s doing this to ingratiate himself in some way, at least with Les, who ‘likes’ him but not that much.    Then she turns up and goes with them, but then rather sulkily stays in the car, then joins them again,  then tries to make Ben show affection and/or susceptibility to her charms, by killing the wounded duck.  Which leads him to self-assertion and to withdraw his feelings, perhaps because he can’t deal with tenderness, and then do what she asked - but cruelly.    What is the matter with Aileen?   Is the point that she feels that can’t trust Ben to stick by her now she’s thirty-two and looking perhaps for a fixed relationship?  The point of her embarrassing question to Ben at the end about her femininity is to do with that perhaps, ‘left on the shelf’.   There’s just a hint that this whole story is about to be replayed with a new ‘Ben’.  We doubt if she’s really  going to college – a gesture towards greater independence, perhaps.

·        Les doesn’t seem to have strong feelings about either Aileen or Ben, and you get the sense that his feelings, whatever they are, are not such as he can express, but can embed in this story.  The story is his feelings.   He mentions his age, and at the end how almost a life time has gone by.   He’s now roughly the age Ben was then.   The moment of intimacy when his mother asks him about her attractiveness is not repeated, and almost as an afterthought he says:   “and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.”     This suggests at first that he’s left home, and perhaps he has.  In the story he’d thought about what she’d do when he did leave home.   But it just leaves open another, additional, meaning that he’s no longer able to respond to her feelings.

·        The ducks and the hunting.    The story was written in 1985, and so might well be drawing on a reader’s possible revulsion.  Why not just enjoy the beauty?   Why do you have to kill it?     Or is the killing a kind of selfie, a proof of how beautiful the ducks were by making one of them, though still and dead, mine?   This collision of the themes of love, fatherliness, and killing, needs more thought.   In one sense, of course, it’s good old conservative ‘manliness’,  the male asserting his powers -  originally , in the anthropological sense of feeding the family, surviving?   Here, the vision of the ducks spread out like that, does have the momentarily unifying effect that sharing a moment a beauty.   And perhaps there’s a parallel between the hunting, capturing, scene, and the personal relations involved.   Ben wants to capture that beauty in some way.  He can’t just ‘stand and stare’ in wonder. (I remember, much less dramatically, as a small boy taking birds’ eggs from the nests and being stirred by their beauty and otherness while shutting out thoughts of stealing, cruelty, killing.)     Or perhaps for some reason he feels he must ‘stamp out’ such moments by killing them, as if he’s guilty of something unmanly.  

·        The one person Les mentions with affection is his father, and the loss of his father is perhaps the ‘engine’ of this story.    The story as a whole made me think about the general problem of fatherless (or motherless)  children and step fathers/mothers.   This is made a problem, it seems to me, when the mother or father left is self-centred, perhaps, or dependent in one way or another on a partner.   There’s always, also, the sense that many children will have of the dead father or mother being irreplaceable like a ‘first love’, a kind of exclusiveness that makes it difficult to have or accept new relationships.   And then there are the ‘coping mechanisms’ people adopt, denying their feelings, loosing the capacity to feel, trust,  let go, and so on.    Les seems to cope by not allowing himself to have much in the way of feelings at all.    Much of this is connected with fear, and fear perhaps with loss of love and so of self.

Spring 2016:  American Short Stories   January 19

On   Collectors by Raymond Carver   

Best to think of this story as a kind of fairy tale puzzle.  It has plenty of interest as it moves along, and generates questions in our minds.  What’s happened that he’s out of work?   Why is he so suspicious when the door is knocked?  We begin to think perhaps he’s in debt, behind on the rent, or even that he’s a squatter.      He’s been there for some time as he knows the quirks of the floor sounds.  And yet later  we find he’s hardly ‘moved in’.

The person at the door does bring good news,  of a kind, but not for the narrator.    As they talk we wonder if the man is Mr Slater, the way he avoids acknowledging it.  And then where’s Mrs Slater who’s won the prize.    In all this story there are no explanations given.    But perhaps most people we come across casually in life are like this.

The demonstration by Aubrey Bell has its fascination, even though we feel – and he seems to as well – his hygiene is wasted on this flat which seems to be almost bare.     But why does Aubrey Bell go through with his so impressive display of skill?   It shows his ability in his job, but skill is often fascinating for its own sake.   And it shows his sense of duty in going through the routine whatever.   And it also focuses on dirt,  the large amount of gunge that our bodies leave behind is, and that we live in, forget, turn our backs on.   He shows the narrator how to clean,  how much of himself is left in and on what he touches, anonymous as he is,  outsider to society as he is.   Aubrey Bell has a job and is very professional in fulfilling its requirements – even though he’s not well.   It would have been so easy for him to skip this one.

So there’s an opposition between the outsider and the insider here, the man with a job and an income and so an identity and a pride, and the man with none of these.   And there’s the ‘winner’,  Mrs Slater, who has won, really, only the privilege to have this demonstration and buy a hoover.  She’s a winner by being a potential consumer.   She’s a winner without realising.   The narrator, by contrast,  is ‘not in the market’.

But Aubrey’s hygiene message is a philosophical one, too, perhaps.

“You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years.  Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that behind.  Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves?”

He answers this is physical day to day terms, of course,

                “Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s’s where!   Pillows, too.  It’s all the same.”

But the philosophical idea is still there, and with it perhaps the idea of Aubrey Bell as a kind of messenger -  whom the narrator can’t get rid of.    And his message?     The need to clean up, sort things out?    Unexpectedly,  he does make some knowledgeably academic comments, first about W H Auden the poey who wore carpet slippers, then about the German poet, Rilke who lived at the expense of a rich countess, which wasn’t “fair”.   He’s drawing a distinction between people like him and perhaps the narrator and people of a different class and degree of privilege.  Yet why do we assume a hoover salesmen would be ignorant about poetry?   Or is that itself a comment a bout the unpoetic nature of a buying and selling society?

The narrator adds more to the theme of collecting bits of ourselves, when he points out that the mattress isn’t his anyway.   He seems to have no roots.  Perhaps he is a squatter, and lives ‘nowhere’?  Like Rilke!

Then a letter does arrive and we think of the one the narrator’s expecting from up north, to do with a job.  But Aubrey Bell – surprisingly easily – prevents him picking up the letter, tells him it’s for a ‘Mr Slater’,  revealing he knows that the narrator is not Mr Slater, but never shows him, and then takes it off himself to return to the sender.  It’s as if the narrator doesn’t want to be identified as Mr Slate.    And we assume Aubrey’s got the idea that the man is a squatter.  He’s nothing to do with Mrs Slater, yet he’s still given him this demonstration.  Why?  To make a buck?

A more bizarre interpretation of the story would be that Aubrey Bell has come on purpose to intercept the letter, his demonstration being just a way of passing time till it comes.

But still, in the end, we’re left thinking, Well what was all that about?    Well, what about the title?  Who are the collectors?   They are all collecting dust and dirt as life goes on. Are they the dust itself?   Aubrey does collect a letter on behalf of the strangely absent Mr Slater.  Mrs Slater in a sense ‘collects’ her prize, but then it’s sent back on her behalf by the narrator.   The narrator collects nothing, except minimal dust and dirt, from which anyway he’s moving on.  He doesn’t collect a letter which would let him enter society.   He collects this experience.

So the story, perhaps, is about not belonging, not even having a home, not even having detritus of your own.   The story is about the empty vulnerable present.

on The Whistle

by Eudora Welty

Approaching the story

Must try not to judge it by how sad or happy it is.   Reading literature not only enlarges our sympathy but also creates a kind of joy out of sorrow.   You might want to look at the study of the way listening to sad music helps us[i].  And Aristotle had something to say on this in his essay on tragedy.

Narrative Point of View

Welty keeps herself well out of the scene.  At the beginning she simply describes the moon, the shack, the people without giving any thoughts of her own.   Their cold and poverty, as it were, ‘speak for themselves’.

It’s quite a while before we get any thoughts of the characters, and then only Sara’s.   First her tiredness and coldness, then her dream-like thoughts of spring, part longing for next spring, part memories of others.   This memory allows us, the readers, to get some idea of the work they do, and we hear about Mr Perkins who ‘owned their farm now’.   And that implies that they’d had to sell up to survive and go on as tenants.   This gives us some ‘back-story’,   that is information about their circumstances before the events in he story began.

Imagery

The moon is continually mentioned as an image of coldness, both physical and social.   There’s a coldness in the way they’re treated by society, and a kind of co-operative coolness between the two of them.  They don’t cuddle up together to get a bit warm.

The fire flickers in the background weakly, and eventually goes out, and then another fire is created by Jason’s burning the furniture.

Cold is a basis for the description of their postures, their anxieties, a threat to them, and also to the tomato crop on which they depend and for which they sacrifice covers and clothes.   The cold sinks into them ‘like the teeth of a trap’.

Characters

The cold and whoever’s let this all happen seem to be ‘characters’.  But the main characters are sparsely drawn, and we only have the thoughts, and few of those, of Sara. Though, of course, it’s Jason who acts, and passionately.

Narrative Form

Most of the story’s taken up with a description of their problem, which has also become their routine way of life.   There is the wider problem of being so cold and poor (and exploited), and the immediate problem of how to get warm now, and Jason’s ‘solution’ to that problem.    Jason’s act seems both inspired and reckless and possibly suicidal.   What does it express?

---

[i] What do nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder all have in common? They're all healthy, feel-good emotions. “For many individuals, listening to sad music can actually lead to beneficial emotional effects,” the researchers, led by psychologist Liila Taruffi, report. “Music-evoked sadness can be appreciated not only as an aesthetic, abstract reward, but [it] also plays a role in well-being, by providing consolation as well as regulating negative moods and emotions.”

The study also revealed that a high number of participants reported listening to sad music in situations of emotional distress or when they’re feeling lonely, so it could be a form of self-medication. “For most of the people, the engagement with sad music in everyday life is correlated with its potential to regulate negative moods and emotions, as well as to provide consolation,” the researchers add.

These findings appear to have some connection to previous research into sad music that suggests listening to it changes the chemistry in our brains to help us get over our grief. According to David Huron, a professor of music at Ohio University in the US, listening to sad music likely causes a spike in the hormone prolactin in the brain.

"Prolactin is the chemical that is used to help curb grief because it's also released during basic human activities - like when we eat, when women ovulate or breastfeed and (perhaps most importantly) when we have sex,” says David Taylor Sloan at Mic.com. "So sad music actually activates a chemical that tones down your grief - suggesting that being sad (and listening to sad music to get there) has deep evolutionary benefits.  -     http://www.sciencealert.com/why-listening-to-sad-songs-is-good-for-you

handout for Liphook Group 7-9-15

ABOUT GOODMAN BROWN

(NATHANIAL HAWTHORNE)

1    There isn’t much ‘plot’.   GB goes off into the forest even though his wife doesn’t want  him to.   She feels vulnerable without him.  He feels a strong pull, just this once, to go.  At the outset we don’t know where he’s going, but gradually the quest gets clearer.  Nothing ‘happens’ except his new recognition  -   recognition of civic worthies at Satan’s gathering, and recognition that his faith is naïve.

2   His journey is portrayed first of all as a kind of duty, then as a temptation, especially when we meet his guide, like him but obviously sinister.  Like many journeys in literature it is a journey of discovery.   What he discovers is that all men are sinners.   And yet, should he be so distraught about that?  Surely that’s what the Bible teaches.   His reaction shows his character as, perhaps what later came to be called rigid or inflexible.  He’s naïve and he can’t get out of his naivety except into despair.

3  The story is very like a medieval mystery play in which Biblical themes are dramatised, and the characters personify ideas such as temptation, faith, or beings such as God or Satan. Perhaps when we first hear his wife’s name, though, we don’t think of her as a personification of the idea of faith.  

4  The atmosphere is strongly Puritan in its intense concern with virtue and faith and being devout.    What it brings out is the idea of hypocrisy, how the very people he’d respected as men and women of God in fact consort with the devil – like the Salem witches were supposed to have done.   Perhaps Hawthorne is saying that the dos and do nots of Puritanism are simplistic.

5  Faith is ambiguous.   She doesn’t want him to leave her (i.e. being a pious good man), but when he sees her among the gathering he calls to her to resist temptation.  We never know what happens next because  Hawthorne cuts at that point.

6  He wonders if the experience is a dream.   It’s never quite clear whether it is or not.  But certainly the atmosphere of the story makes it feel like one.  The dark wood is often seen as a frightening place where evil, pagans, and beasts live.

7   When he returns he refuses his wife’s kiss, and turns away from her.   Hypocritically he blames here for doing what he did.  But if he’d stayed at home with her?    Well, he’d not have learnt what the world was really like.  

8  Perhaps the story is a version  of the Fall of Man in Genesis.   GB ends the story no longer in his Garden of Eden.  He has found knowledge of good and evil.    But his wife does not seem much like Eve.   What is the meaning of her pink ribbons?  

9   How do we interpret the end of the story?  He becomes cynical?  He loses his faith?   Or she loses him?   What is he tempted by?   Sin as such?

Notes on

The Duchess and the Jeweller

by Virginia Woolf

The narrative is simple enough.    Oliver has a visit from the Duchess who persuades him to buy some pearls.   He is dissuaded from checking if the pearls are genuine by her offer of an invitation to her high class home where he will be able to spend the weekend with her daughter with whom he obviously is in love.

Oliver is very aware of his status as ‘nouveau rich’, having begun as a street boy and petty crook before getting into the diamond trade in a way which is only half described by sounds sleazy.   Now he is the richest jeweller in England.   But he is not content, though he drools over his drawers of jewels like a miser.

The crux of the narrative comes when the Duchess visits him needed money to pay a gambling debt which he husband mustn’t find out about.  She is potentially vulnerable to an unscrupulous man, especially if he should find at that the pearls she wants him to buy are fakes.   But she has a bargaining counter, her beautiful daughter.

There’s a tension while Oliver decides if he is going to buy the pearls, and this has some sexual overtones.   She is not offering herself, however, but herself at one remove, as it were.   And Oliver allows himself to be deceived because he is not really buying the pearls but Diana.

The story brings out the unpleasant and dishonest materialism of the English upper class with its ill-gotten gains and sex (indirectly) for sale.

A question which arose at the time Woolf published the story (and she tone done some of the story because of it) was anti-Semitism.   Oliver is a Jew (with the ironical surname of Bacon).    He is not just a poor boy made himself rich, but a Jew getting admittance into English high society, a stereotypical Jew with a prominent nose and a lot of not quite honestly gained money.  

Some critics have seen the story as not anti-Semitic because Oliver is shown as the dupe of the Duchess, and so a victim rather than an exploiter.   She knows he knows the pearls are fake but also that he cannot resists her bribe.   At the time the story was published, 1938, anti-Semitism was far more strident than it is  now, and there was nothing like ‘political correctness’.    The myth pedalled was that Jews were a threat because they ‘stuck together’ in business and did not have a sincere allegiance to England – or whichever European country they lived in.   They were seen – according to this ideology – as therefore a threat to English tradition and business.

However, the story is  also a psychological study of the emotional insecurity of a rags-to-riches man.   His continual recall of his mother is a reaching back for the social roots which he has left behind.

I can’t comment at all expertly on Woolf’s anti-Semitism.   She seems to have fallen into the prejudiced jargon of the time,  but  perhaps as she got older repented it. “How I hated marrying a Jew . . .   what a snob I was,”  she wrote about her husband, Leonard.

Further   notes on

The Wall

Laughter   

Pablo doesn’t try to protect Gris out of patriotism, but because he funds it funny to see them rushing about.  Also this sense of the ridiculous is mixed with his stubbornness.   At the end of the story, also, he ends up laughing.   There’s an element of the ‘absurd’ here, perhaps.    But he does, he believes as the time, condemn himself to death. 

Compassion

Always Pablo comes across as very street wise.  Nobody fools him.  We wonder perhaps if this itself isn’t a kind of mask, bravado, to help him deal with the situation.   Yet all through the story he finds himself showing pity.  Even though he claims to despise it.

Death

Death itself is a kind of wall.  It is a blank end beyond which it isn’t possible to imagine.   So Sartre turns his back on the tradition that the fact of death enhances a person’s life, sense of life;   and certainly on the tradition which sees a life beyond death, and which has inspired so much European literature, art and music.

It’s worth remembering the advice which Siduri gives to the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, whose quest to overcome death has failed.

As for you, Gilgamesh,  fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man'.

from Rodney Fisher

an 'Italian' version of Jack and the Beanstalk

Unas appona taim uasa boi name Giacche.  E uoroche anne fam.  E plante.

E plao. E milche de cause. E fidde chiccense.  Esai itse toffe laife.

Uan dei ise moma ghiv eme binne ana tell ime planta de binne ana ghetto

binnestocche.  Datsa guiste warri didde, ana soneeamagonne iffe binnestoche no gro

oppe uan, tu, tri, fifte fitte laiche fairaidran, ana itse gadde inoffe binnese tu fidde da cit e Bostin fo twenty irs.  Itte gro aire den ole de claudes.  Iu nevve sen saccie big e binnestocche in iur laiffe.

Giacche go picchene, picchene, and picchene aire en aire tille e pesse de claudes,

ana e se a cassel bilonghe tu a giante u uonse a biudefool uaite gus. Ole taime

disse giant ise singhe “ Fe, Fi, Fo Fum,  ai smella blode uva inglesmanne”.

Ittse onli songhe ino.  Giacche isa Americana so e don uarri. Uenne de giant folle sleppe enne snorene laiche Versuvio,  Giacche grob  de uaite gus enne ronne

 laiche elle. He getta om saif en e sei tu isa papa  “Lucche me !  Lucce uarri ai gotte!”

“Gudde” sei es papa. “Iu gonne ave ardboila heggeste for breggfeste.”

Neggeste dei ise moma boila de heggeste ana uarra iu tinghe? Dei uas gholen gus heggese, enna isa papa brecce ise folse titte.

“Moma” ei sei  “Demme titte costa me siveni faive dollars” Enne ghiva Giacche da bittenghe ova isa laif.

De morrale ove dissa stor ise “Iffa iu guarra enoffe trobbel inna iur onne becciard,donna go lucchen fo binnes”

       

Thoughts on


The Wall


by


Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre is one of the great figures in postwar philosophy as well as being a novelist and political activist.   This story was published in 1939 just after the Spanish Civil War which it deals with, and just before the Second World War in which Sartre was first a soldier, then a prisoner of war, and after escaping a member of the French Underground.   The Wall is his second publication, coming after the novel Nausea.   Both of these are about what is known as Existentialism, a philosophical movement which ask what it is for a person to ‘be’,  to live.   And it often focuses on the final meaninglessness of human life on the one hand, and on the other the need for us to try and be total honest with ourselves, to be in ‘good faith’, and not try to make up comforting myths and roles to hide from the starkness of existence as such.   Later, after the war, Sartre became interested in Marxism and social issues.   But in The Wall you can see how he works variations on the theme of death, the end of 'existence'  when it stares his characters in the face.  

The story deals with three prisoners of war who are about to be shot, and it looks at the ways they try to deal with this.

The main character and narrator, Pablo, is an anti-fascist revolutionary, who seems to represent Sartre’s own viewpoint.   He is able to remain stable, to deal with his fear, although it is not so much fear as acceptance that now everything is finished, and since it is his life doesn’t matter very because all human life is pointless.  He shows physical manifestations of fear in his sweating and so on,  but  has no regrets.   His decision to try to save Gris, one of his leaders, is made not out of bravery or dedication, but just for the hell of it.   We see at the end the link between his viewpoint and ‘absurdism’.

Pablo simply closes up and ceases to exist or to value anything, as it were ‘in advance’,

Juan, the youngster is concerned with the process of being shot, how long his death will take.   He’s concerned more with fear of suffering than the concept of death itself.

Tom,  is concerned primarily with his problem of registering that he’s actually going to stop existing.  

The Belgian doctor gives another viewpoint, that of the observer and student of how people behave in this situation.   He even tries little 'experiments'

Another view point we might forget is that of ourselves, the readers, who are observers, of course, but not dispassionate.   We identify with the characters and judge them from our own perspectives.  They make us reflect on our own mortality.  We imagine briefly ourselves in their final situation.  We don't necessarily take Pablo's authorial viewpoint.

SOME POINTS

How far do you sympathise with Pablo's viewpoint.  

Is he convincing?   Or is he also playing a role?

Is he 'macho'?  Realistic?  'Materialistic?

Does Sartre create a sense of 'before-death'?

Why DOES Pablo decide to give information about Gris?

What ARE Pablo's feelings at the end?

Jack and the Beanstalk

There was once a boy called Jack who was brave and quick-witted. He lived with his mother in a small cottage and their most valuable possession was their cow, Milky-White. But the day came when Milky-White gave them no milk and Jack's mother said she must be sold. "Take her to market," she told Jack, "and mind you get a good price for her." So Jack set out to market leading Milky-White by her halter. After a while he sat down to rest by the side of the road. An old man came by and Jack told him where he was going. "Don't bother to go to the market," the old man said. "Sell your cow to me. I will pay you well. Look at these beans. Only plant them, and overnight you will find you have the finest bean plants in all the world. You'll be better off with these beans than with an old cow or money. Now, how many is five, Jack?" "Two in each hand and one in your mouth," replied Jack, as sharp as a needle. "Right you are, here are five beans," said the old man and he handed the beans to Jack and took Milky-White's halter. When he reached home, his mother said, "Back so soon, Jack? Did you get a good price for Milky-White?" Jack told her how he had exchanged the cow for five beans and before he could finish his account, his mother started to shout and box his ears. "You lazy good-for-nothing boy!" she screamed, "How could you hand over our cow for five old beans? What will we live on now? We shall starve to death, you stupid boy." She flung the beans through the open window and sent Jack to bed without his supper. When Jack woke the next morning there was a strange green light in his room. All he could see from, the window was green leaves. A huge beanstalk had shot up overnight. It grew higher than he could see. Quickly Jack got dressed and stepped out of the window right onto the beanstalk and started to climb. "The old man said the beans would grow overnight," he thought. "They must indeed be very special beans." Higher and higher Jack climbed until at last he reached the top and found himself on a strange road. Jack followed it until he came to a great castle where he could smell the most delicious breakfast. Jack was hungry. It had been a long climb and he had nothing to eat since midday the day before. Just as he reached the door of the castle he nearly tripped over the feet of an enormous woman. "Here, boy," she called. "What are you doing? Don't you know my husband likes to eat boys for breakfast? It's lucky I have already fried up some bacon and mushrooms for him today, or I'd pop you in the frying pan. He can eat you tomorrow, though." "Oh, please don't let him eat me," pleaded Jack. "I only came to ask you for a bite to eat. It smells so delicious." Now the giant's wife had a kind heart and did not really enjoy cooking boys for breakfast, so she gave Jack a bacon sandwich. He was still eating it when the ground began to shake with heavy footsteps, and a loud voice boomed: "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum." "Quick, hide!" cried the giant's wife and she pushed Jack into the oven. "After breakfast, he'll fall asleep," she whispered. "That is when you must creep away." She left the oven door open a crack so that jack could see into the room. Again the terrible rumbling voice came: "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." A huge giant came into the room. "Boys, boys, I smell boys," he shouted. "Wife, have I got a boy for breakfast today?" "No, dear," she said soothingly. "You have got bacon and mushrooms. You must still be smelling the boy you ate last week." The giant sniffed the air suspiciously but at last sat down. He wolfed his breakfast of bacon and mushrooms, drank a great bucketful of steaming tea and crunched up a massive slice of toast. Then he fetched a couple of bags of gold from a cupboard and started counting gold coins. Before long he dropped off to sleep. Quietly Jack crept out of the oven. Carefully he picked up two gold coins and ran as fast as he could to the top of the beanstalk. He threw the gold coins into his mother's garden and climbed after them. At the bottom he found his mother looking in amazement at the gold coins and the beanstalk. Jack told her of his adventures in the giant's castle and when she examined the gold she realized he must be speaking the truth. Jack and his mother used the gold to buy food. But the day came when the money ran out and Jack decided to climb the beanstalk again. It was all the same as before, the long climb, the road to the castle, the smell of breakfast and the giant's wife. But she was not so friendly this time. "Aren't you the boy who was here before," she asked, "on that day some gold was stolen from under my husband's nose?"         But Jack convinced her she was wrong and in time her heart softened again         and she gave him some breakfast. Once more Jack was eating then the ground shuddered and the great voice boomed: "Fee. Fi, Fo, Fum." Quickly, Jack jumped into the oven. As he entered, the giant bellowed: "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of cm Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." The giant's wife put a plate of sizzling sausages before him, telling him he must be mistaken. After breakfast the giant fetched a hen from a back room. Every time he said "Lay!" the hen laid an egg of solid gold. "I must steal that hen, if I can," thought Jack, and he waited until the giant fell asleep. Then he slipped out of the oven, snuck up to the top of the beanstalk, keeping the hen under one arm, he scrambled down the Beanstalk as fast as he could until he reached the bottom. Jack's mother was waiting but she was not pleased when she saw the hen. "Another of your silly ideas, is it, bringing an old hen when you might have brought us some gold? I don't know, what is to be done with you?" Then Jack set the hen down carefully, and commanded "Lay!" just as the giant had done. To his mother's surprise the hen laid an egg of solid gold. Jack and his mother now lived in great luxury. But in time Jack became a little bored and decided to climb the beanstalk again. This time he did not risk talking to the giant's wife in case she recognized him. He slipped into the kitchen when she was not looking and hid himself in the log basket. He watched the giant's wife prepare breakfast and then he heard the giant's roar: "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." "If it's that cheeky boy who stole your gold and our magic hen, then help you catch him," said the giant's wife. "Why don't we look in the oven? It's my guess he'll be hiding there." You may be sure that Jack was glad he was not in the oven. The giant and his wife hunted high and low but never thought to look in the log basket. At last they gave up and the giant sat down to breakfast. After he had eaten, the giant fetched a harp. When he commanded "Play!" the harp played the most beautiful music. Soon the giant fell asleep, and Jack crept out of the log basket. Quickly he snatched up the harp and ran. But the harp called out loudly, "Master, save me! Save me!" and the giant woke. With a roar of rage and he chased after Jack. Jack raced down the road towards the beanstalk with the giant's footsteps thundering behind him. When he reached the top of the beanstalk he threw down the harp and started to slither down after it. The giant followed, and now the whole beanstalk shook and shuddered with his weight and Jack feared for his life. At last he reached the ground and seizing an ax,  Jack chopped at the beanstalk with all his might. Snap! "Look out, mother!" he called as the giant came tumbling down, head first. He lay dead at their feet with the beanstalk on the ground beside them. The harp was broken, but the hen continued to lay golden eggs for Jack and his mother and they lived happily and in great comfort for a long, long time.

Some Interpretations.

1   The story illustrates, metaphorically, the way Jack grows to maturity, from dependent child, to well-to-do man whose mother depends on him.

2   Jack is a layabout who gets into bad company, then into burglary, and ends up a very successful criminal

3  Jack works out a psychological problem. He enacts a kind of Oedipus complex in which he kills his father and controls replaces him as head of the household.

4  There’s a great emphasis of wealth in the story. It’s a struggle for gold.

5  There are two worlds, the real world of poverty and cattle markets, and a dream world of beanstalks and talking harps and ogres.   Jack manages to reconcile the two by destroying the dream world, but at the same time ‘milking it’ of its value.  

6   The ogre eats boys and Englishmen.  Obviously he deserves to be deceived by his wife and fleeced and killed by Jack.

7  The women in the story are foolish.  Jack’s Mum is wrong about the beanstalk, and doesn’t see the value of the hen.  The  giant’s wife deceives and indirectly causes his death.

8   The tale deals, as so often, with anxieties:  about poverty, about being killed, about leaving home.

9   Looking at the picture above don't you feel a little sorry for the Giant?