The thing about the narrator in "Marital Problems" by Robin Romm is that she doesn't have any

Organizing a story around the search for an item is both an ancient practice and also still a ubiquitous one in modern times. Jason looking for the Golden Fleece or Perseus seeking Medusa's head.  King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail. To the best of my ability to understand their plot, nearly every Avengers movie between 2012 and 2018. There's something very satisfying and centering about the quest for an item. Every book on writing will tell aspiring authors that if they want their audiences to care, they have to make their characters want something, and the quest for an item makes that something very easy to identify. 

Right from the first sentence of Robin Romm's "Marital Problems," we have a MacGuffin driving character action, a thing the narrator Paige and her husband Victor are looking for. It won't appear until the story's closing act, and when it appears, we'll realize, as one often does with MacGuffins, that it wasn't about the thing itself.

What they're looking for is a dead bird buried in the binoculars case of Victor's dead father. Their flibbertigibbet daughter has used the case to bury it, but being a flibbertigibbet, either doesn't remember where or simply won't say. Victor never knew his deadbeat dad, but recently, a half brother who found Victor through a DNA database brought him their father's binoculars so Victor could have something of their father. Their father, it turned out, was a birder, which is to say one of his favorite pastimes was looking for things. Which makes their MacGuffin sort of circular: they are looking for something that encases the thing you use to look for something. Add to this the fact that the daughter and her babysitter buried the bird while the parents were at an actual funeral, and you've got a good deal of circularity going on here.

You could say that there is yet another layer of circularity to the search, because Paige knows that for Victor, his missing father has made him feel like he's been missing something his whole life. So they're looking for the thing that represents the thing he's always been looking for. When Victor rages about wanting to beat up their terrible contractor Marco, Paige knows what he's really doing is expressing his "ancient, private rage" against his father. 

Along with the search for the MacGuffin, Marco's kitchen remodel forms a good deal of the tension in the story. Marco is terrible, but Portland is an expensive city, so they're kind of stuck with the only contractor who will do their kitchen for what they can afford. Paige is attracted to Marco, but seems in control of her attraction, enough to make fun of herself for having it. 

The narrator's own, private desire

Paige believes she knows about Marco's marriage and that it is unhappy, although he hasn't said so explicitly. She notes that although she can figure out what's going on in the marriages of other people, she's not sure what's going on in her own. In her marriage to Victor, there has been a loss of sexual desire that comes with age, and she's not really up to doing the work to get it back. In her imagination, Paige contrasts her own sex-less marriage with the life of her friend Danielle, whom she envies. Danielle is wealthier than them, and last night Danielle just left her daughter Madeline with Victor and Paige in order to have sex with her new boyfriend, sex Paige imagines in satisfying detail. So in addition to the physical object of desire in the binoculars case serving as a casket that the couple wants to find, Paige has her own mental object of desire, which is the life of her friend Danielle. 

This could be the makings of a tragedy, but instead, the story is a rom-com. Paige's willingness to follow her own fantasies and note the lack of reality in them allows her to survive the things that typically doom a marriage. She describes Marco as "Hansel all grown up, a fairy-tale boy," meaning she knows that her imagination of him isn't real. Paige also is conscious throughout of the things she has, even when envying the things she lacks. She knows her husband is still attractive and that other women envy her the way she envies Danielle. Paige recognizes that although Danielle's daughter has things their daughter Lucy lacks, Lucy is bright and quick-witted and much prettier than Madeline. 

Paige is just doing what all good wives and mothers do when she indulges her fantasies a bit.

The story's tension is released in a climax as satisfying as the sex Paige imagines

All three sources of tension--the missing binoculars case, the bum of a contractor, and Paige's envy of Danielle--come together in an explosive climax. Madeline and Danielle come to Paige's house to help locate the missing binoculars case. Marco is there, and it turns out, he was the guy Danielle had sex with the night before. Victor, fed up with Marco, spills the beans about Marco being married, and Marco, fed up with Victor making him actually do what he was paid to do, punches Victor. At the same time, the girls show up with the bird, which turns out to have just been the dead bird. There never was a binoculars case. 

The climax is not the fulfillment of fantasies, but their dissolution. There never was a binoculars case. The father wasn't worth getting to know. Marco isn't a god with muscles carved of soap. Daniele's life isn't perfect. Victor has reasserted his position as a good partner, because he uses Marco's sudden outburst to threaten to call the police, thereby extracting promises from him to finish the kitchen at last. In the story's final lines, Paige considers the dead bird. It's some common backyard bird, one so "close at hand, you wouldn't need binoculars to find it." It's one of the most common endings to a MacGuffin story, the ending that what you were looking for was there all along, but it manages to do it without being in the least bit trite. 

In reality, there was never a moment in the story when Paige didn't know she had what she wanted. This isn't the familiar story of the young person who dreams of going off to find adventure only to realize adventure was right under their nose the whole time, but more of a person who suspected her life was good in spite of its growing weight and difficulty, who finds at the end that her suspicions were correct. 

My blogging pal Karen Carlson jokes sometimes about how "sensitive portrayal of a marriage falling apart" is a lit fic cliché. A story called "Marital Problems" could have become that story, but it isn't. It's about how to make a marriage survive its issues, not a meditation on how it falls apart. That's because it's a comedy, not a tragedy. Ultimately, it's Paige's own self-effacing sense of humor that helps her marriage to survive. She refuses to take her own feelings too seriously, contrasting them with people like Daniele, "so quick to feel their feelings, as if they curate and file them carefully so that whenever they think a thought, they can find the corresponding emotion." We often speak as though being in close touch with one's feelings is emotionally healthy, but it's Paige's own ironic distance from hers that helps her to arrive at her recognition of the good thing she has going.  

Nancy Drew learns the value of abstract art: "Rain" by Colin Barrett (O.Henry Anthology)

Most literary theory is painful to read, but there's one story from the discipline that is actually kind of a good yarn. Stanley Fish was teaching a class on mystic poetry, and he came in to the classroom one day and found five names of linguists still written on the board from the previous lecture. The names were Jacobs, Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, and Hayes. Instead of erasing the names, he presented the names to his students as though they constituted another mystical religious poem for them to study. The class wasted no time coming up with highly original interpretations that made the five names seem like what Fish had told them it was. Jacobs became Jacob from the Old Testament, Rosenbaum and Levin were some kind of indicator of the Jewish people, and Thorne pointed to the crown of thorns Christ wore during his crucifixion. Somehow, it all fit together. Fish's point was that interpretive communities tend to read things according to the standards of their community. If they are looking for a mystic poem, they'll find one. 

I've recalled this anecdote because in reading "Rain" by Colin Barrett, it's possible someone might accuse me of inventing meaning in a particular way because I'm a literary blogger who is committed to finding just that kind of meaning in stories, not because the meaning is really there. Of course, I run that risk with every story, as some people are inclined to resist readings that find any kind of meaning that isn't overt, but it's particularly true with this story, because the story itself is so simple, it's hard at first to see that there is anything going on other than two sisters spending an ordinary day in their non-traditional Irish family. (In this case, not meaning that they're of Irish ancestry, but that the story is actually set in Ireland.) 

The surface story

Scully and Charlie are sixteen and thirteen. They are schlepping ice and snacks back from the store for their family when they see a note pinned to an old public phone booth: "IF ASHA CALLS TELL HER TO GO HOME." 

This isn't the first time Scully has seen this note, and she's been trying to work out what the details behind it are. She shows an almost Sherlock Holmes-level of attention to detail. It's not warm-hearted, like a parent would write if their child were missing. And it says "go home," not "come home." Someone, Scully realizes, knows enough about Asha to know she might call this pay phone, but not enough to know where Asha is. 

Because the story is from Scully's point of view but not her first-person narration, it's hard to say for certain what details we get are hers and which are the narrator interpreting through her senses.  Some perceptions are clearly labeled as hers, but some aren't, but we can assume that at least some of the highly perceptive account of what Scully sees and senses is her own, leading us to understand that Scully, like other literary detectives, tries to understand her world through keen observation. 

If someone is going to accuse me of reading too much meaning into this story, I can at least say that the story invites creative meanings by having Scully convinced throughout that there is an answer to the riddle of the note, and the answer is hiding in plain sight if only she and Charlie can puzzle it out. If that's not an invitation to look for mysteries hiding in plain sight of the story, I don't know what is. 

Scully is on the case, although it's not quite an X-file.

Looking a little closer, the note isn't the only place where meaning is hiding just below the surface. The title of the story is "Rain," and at the outset, it looks like this is referring to real rain, because the girls have come out from the shop just after a rain and all the trees are wet. But a little later on, we find that the boyfriend of their mother is nicknamed Rain, because he reminded their mother of German film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Rain himself seems to believe that dreams can signify something more than they seem to, because he interprets a dream about losing one's teeth to concerns about money. The text is inviting the reader to go beyond surface level, to investigate. 

Rain and their mother Mel seem to be long-term romantic partners who live together. They're not the only people at the house. Victor, who is Rain's friend at the psychiatric hospital where they are security guards, is there. So is Mel's younger sister Natalie and Natalie's two-year-old rambunctious daughter Tessa. It's a pretty full house, and it's obvious that on days when everyone is off work, this gathering of everyone in the home is pretty normal. According to the routine, Rain and Victor will eventually go off to the pub while Mel, Natalie and the girls stay at home, watch movies, and drink Coke and eat digestives (sort of like cookies). 

The economy of the story, which gives us very little information about each character, is violated when we learn about the artistic temperaments of Mel and Rain. This is the only part of the story that is expansive in its explanations. Both are apparently artist enough to be considered artists by other people, although Rain doesn't seem to keep it up anymore. Mel does "realistic" art where the things she draws look like the things she sees. In fact, Scully is taken aback by how realistic they are, and she wonders if anyone can make art of greater verisimilitude than her mother can. Rain, on the other hand, does abstract art:

"Rain had painted abstracts, near identical pictures featuring dense, somber swabs of muted color that looked depressing and dreary, like pictures of migraines or terrible weather. Mel's pictures were charcoal and pencil sketches of body parts; sections of torsos, faces with precisely smudged mouths and wary, animate eyes, disembodied hands and feet flexing and gesturing in white space."

Scully is glad that Rain has given up art so she doesn't have to see his work anymore. It's clear she values her mother's work over Rain's, because it looks like the thing it's of. Her work is more difficult, she feels. She understand that in art, there's more to it than just being accurate, and she knows that Rain's work was more valued by people who knew about art than Mel's, but she can't help thinking Mel is more talented. Her feelings about his art mirror those she has for him: she doesn't hate Rain, but she doesn't love him and isn't sure she actually likes him.

And now we turn Thorne into a crown of thorns

It's notable that the pictures Mel draws have "wary" eyes and disembodied hands and feet. It's like she's drawing crime scenes. Perhaps Mel has endured some trauma, or maybe she just shares her daughter's interest in solving mysteries. If so, Mel seems to approach the mysterious the same way as her daughter: by using reason and close observation of what is there. Her work values precision over artistic feeling and exaggeration. Rain's doesn't. Rain's work emphasizes feeling.

And that's the conflict, such as it is, in the story. It's not set up to be a high-tension conflict. In fact, Scully realizes at last, Rain, for all his faults, seems to know how to allow for choices to be made in ways that avoid conflict. He knows that Scully must have been wanting to go out and see what the pub is all about. He's willing to take her along, but that would mean Scully making a decision to change the status quo, choosing a night out over staying in with her mother and family. It would mean a decisive step toward growing up. Rain rigs this choice for her, though, by asking if both Charlie and Scully want to come along. He knows Charlie will want to, but only if Scully does, so Scully can say yes while making it look like she's doing it to be considerate of her sister. Nobody is making decisions in defiance of any established order; they're all just being considerate of others. 

Rain's intuitive approach has advantages Mel and Scully's logical and deductive one doesn't. There's no great storm in this story that leads to a thundering climax, only a soft rain that gives way to growth afterwards. The moment when things seem like they might erupt, when Rain declares, "Enough of this...Hand me my sword, Victor," isn't Rain about to explode. His "sword," it turns out, is a knife on his key chain. He's breaking up ice with it. It's a tool to get things unstuck, and it's attached to keys, the universal metaphor for something that solves a problem. This moment is the moment when Rain is going to solve a problem that nobody even knows is a problem yet. 

The conflict of the story has passed, and nobody even realized it was a conflict, including the reader. It was there, though, hiding in plain sight, and it was Rain who cracked the case. Just like the rain at the outset of the story, that passed while the girls were inside and didn't even know it was coming, this Rain has quietly descended without anyone else knowing. 

Rain has solved one problem before it became a problem, but by story's end, nobody has cracked the case of the missing girl on the phone booth. Rain doesn't even know anyone named Asha. Perhaps Rain, by teaching Scully about a different way of approaching problems, has given her a key to unlock it, or, if not this particular problem, other problems in her life. Scully notes that you can only learn tricks like this from Rain about how to get what you want but disguise it if you "paid attention." She is an expert at paying attention, and perhaps Rain has noticed this, too, which is why he knows he can communicate with her in a coded language. The text of "Rain" deals with its reader in a similar manner, locking its mysteries up in a way that only a reader who pays attention can unlock. 

Everything out there is dangerous: "The Castle of Rose Tellin" by Kate DiCamillo

There is a bit of a joke in literary theory that with a certain brand of New Criticism, all poems tend to be about poetry. If I say that at least part of what "The Castle of Rose Tellin" by Kate DiCamillo is about is the forging of the psyche of a young writer, I hope it won't be seen as glib, nor will it cause readers to groan and think the story unoriginal. Readers shouldn't come away thinking, "Oh, writing about writing, how novel." The story is about a lot more than that. It's about the most important thing there is to write about, which is dealing with the disorienting sense of life in the universe, a sense that comes upon children at about the age of Pen during the course of events in the story. 

I remember when it happened to me. I was about six, the same age as Pen in the story, and I was coming in from recess at school. Like most kids, I didn't want to come in, and my mind wandered. Why wasn't life all recess? Why did it have to consist of things people didn't like? In fact, why was it mostly occupied with disagreeable things one had to do in order to get to the few good ones? Before we even began to file inside, I had someone gotten to the question of why life even exists, how weird just being somewhere was, and my head was swimming, and I don't think I've ever really recovered from that. 

Pen is equally thrown off balance in the story. How does she cope?

Contradictory threats

Pen's brother Thomas, who is three years older and three years more advanced in developing neuroses, tells her that "everything out there is dangerous."  Pen has already started to notice the same thing, although her fear manifests itself more as nausea than as paranoia. One characteristic of Pen's fears is that they are coming at her from two different sides. During the car ride to the family vacation in Sanibel, she feels claustrophobic. But she's also recently experienced a nearly opposite fear. Her mother took her to the circus, and when the clowns did their clown car bit, she was terrified. Her brother taught her the notion of "infinity" to describe the endless clowns, and she hasn't been right since. Infinity gives her an agoraphobia-like sense, that there are no borders and no limits, while claustrophobia gives her a fear of being too hemmed-in. She is suddenly aware of living in a universe in which both too little order and too much order are threats.

There are other indicators of similar fears. She is unnerved by the glass dining room table the family eats on during vacation, because she can see her feet below it. With the table she's used to, there is a visual limit that carves the world up into discrete chunks. The glass table removes those limits, and she feels disoriented. However, she also feels too hemmed in by the boxing gloves her father makes her wear at night to keep from biting her fingers. She worries that her hands won't be inside them anymore. So she worries when she can see her feet, but also when she can't see her hands. She's getting hit from both sides.

About those gloves

The gloves are the central image of the story. The father has decreed that Pen wear them in order to keep from messing up the shape of her mouth by sucking on her fingers in her sleep. The gloves are restricting, but they also have on them a kangaroo. This kangaroo is wearing boxing glovers with a kangaroo on them, which in turn has another kangaroo with boxing gloves. Pen imagines this repeating itself on into infinity, which then makes her woozy again, although she muses that an infinity of kangaroos isn't as terrifying as an infinity of clowns. (I think most people would agree.)

What Pen is experiencing is mise-en-abyme, "placed into the abyss" a technique in which a painting places itself inside itself, and then on and on. The Baroque movement in art was especially interested in this technique, perhaps because it was a time in intellectual history when the world seemed particularly unsettling. The Reformation had blown apart centuries of relative intellectual stability, and the introduction of novelties like calculus and the Scientific Revolution, which happened while the Baroque movement was already in progress, helped make the world seem even stranger, and perhaps much larger, in a dizzying way. 

It's appropriate that it was the father who forced the gloves upon Pen. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the father is the symbol of law in the form of language and cultural norms. The father impedes upon childlike imagination to bring structure. This is exactly what Pen's father does. He is, in fact, a literal lawgiver, because he is a judge. Pen calls him the "voice of reason and judgement." 

The law can be harsh, because it imposes penalties, but law always claims these penalties are for our own good. Without them, there would be anarchy, and so rules and discipline are a way of holding back one kind of threat, the one associated with infinity and too much freedom. The law is supposed to be like boxing gloves, something that is used to hurt, but not hurt as much. Of course, as soon as Pen introduces the idea of something not "hurting that much," she recalls how her father one pulled Thomas up by the hair in order to not "hurt him that much," but Thomas can only recall how much it hurt.

If too much freedom, represented in the story by Thomas and his willingness to invent facts and believe too many things, is one kind of danger, then too much law, represented in the story by the father, is another. Thomas worries that everything "out there" is dangerous, but the danger in their home is just as great. The father, most people would agree, is just abusive. He's wound up and on edge and Thomas, with his flights of fancy, drives him crazy and makes him violent. Pen is his favorite, but she suffers just as much from being near the violence. The mother chides the father, but she doesn't outright defy the law. In fact, she has submitted to it in many forms, including giving up her former dancing career. 

Pen's insight 

The family vacation gets more and more out of control as Thomas is determined to escape because he thinks everything is out to get him. Eventually, the car is wrecked and Dad is in a mental institution with a nervous breakdown. Unlimited imagination and rigid law have managed to nearly destroy one another, leaving Pen to try to figure out how to navigate her way between the two. It doesn't help that so many threats can't be seen, like the invisible flies that bite or the trap door from which the clowns emerge.

Pen's moment of insight comes on the beach after the father has gone to the mental institution. She is building a sand castle, and she looks around at all the shells. The shells are so numerous, they constitute a virtual infinity of shells, but instead of being made nauseous or unnerved by the infinity, she limits herself to only selecting a few of the shells to adorn her castle. She has used limitations to tame infinity, but she is not absolute in her application of the law, because she is still letting her imagination work on the construction of the castle. She builds a secret room beneath the castle to hide from the "Child Catcher," because "kids were against the law." If law helps her to control the dizzying effects of the infinite space of the universe and imagination, then imagination also allows her to fight back against the tyranny of law.

This is what writers and artists of all kinds do. They use form, like a sand castle, to shape reality and bring order to chaos, but they do not become such slaves to form that they are handcuffed by it. If her name, Pen, wasn't an indicator that she is a writer--whatever justification her father gives for naming her Penelope--then her final transformation is.

Pen also performs one other job of a writer: she is the memory for others. Her brother is unable to remember key points about the trip, but "Pen remembers it all."  He does remember the child catcher, meaning Pen's story she has created has helped him to survive the ordeal, too. 

I'm an idiot

I'm terrible with names in general. I knew my wife for months before I could remember her name. There have been times I've blogged about a writer and not realized I have blogged about them before. Because this story deals with what, to my mind, is the most important thing a writer can write about, I was interested in seeing if there was something more I could read by DiCamillo. Um, yes. She's the author of Because of Winn Dixie and several other hugely successful novels. 

I don't actually think my lack of knowledge of the landscape of contemporary authors hurts my ability to analyze fiction much. You can read a story for what's there without having any idea who wrote it most of the time. It was, however, an experience that Pen might have found vertigo-inducing to go from the minute details of a task like closely reading the text of this one story to realizing the person who wrote it is a really big deal. 

Intimacy on top: "My Good Friend" by Juliana Leite (O.Henry Anthology)

One of the most-read posts I've ever written was the one about whether the relationship between Frodo and Sam Gamgee included homoerotic elements. My conclusion was that the most interesting reading of their story is that in their extraordinary intimacy, trust, and love for one another, they do erase somewhat the border between friendship and romantic love, but that ultimately, their love isn't best understood as a lasting romantic one. 

The two unnamed characters in Juliana Leite's "My Good Friend" share a similarly hard-to-pin-down relationship, much to the consternation of the children of the narrator's good friend. (From here on, I will use "N" for narrator and "GF" for her good friend, as both are unnamed throughout the story.) The children whisper among themselves about the true nature of the relationship between their father and N, whose friendship predates their own existence, or even the marriage of their parents. N insists they have it wrong, and they are ingrates for thinking what they think and putting the word "friendship" in air quotes, but is she herself wrong or in denial about what her relationship to GF really is? Do the children see what she refuses to see?

There is no denying that N and GF share an exceptional level of intimacy. N comes to GF's house often for dinner, where they talk about loneliness and living without their deceased spouses. N is careful to wear perfume when she arrives and bring a carefully though-out desert; GF, in turn, shows how much he cares by cleaning his house with Pine Sol and making food she likes. 

N and GF's friendship continued on through their marriages to other people. N apparently adored GF's wife, Suzy, and Suzy seems to have returned at least some of the affection, possibly because it is impossible not to be charmed by someone who looks up to you so much: "Suzy bought (a tablecloth) and I copied her and bought another just like it but a little smaller. Suzy knew how to take care of a home, and when she was with me she would often slow down, so I could imitate her without rushing." Suzy interpreted N's imitation as flattery. 

N's imitation of Suzy didn't end with buying the same housewares. Because they got married within a few months of one another, they actually shared a wedding dress, Suzy wearing it first and N a few months later, with only a change of ribbon to make it somewhat her own. N even grew out her hair before her wedding because Suzy recommended it, and N trusted Suzy's sense of style: "I went along with my friend, because Suzy knew how to primp and preen like a lady, how to make those magnificent curls, wear perfumed handkerchiefs, etc." On the day of the story, N is still meticulous about applying perfume to her scarf before visiting GF. 

N describes her close relationship to GF as "sultry and velvety at times, but...also dull and tightly drawn, like a chicken wire fence." The children notice more of the "sultry and velvety" aspect of their relationship. Moreover, the children have picked up on how the relationship between N and GF has always, in N's words managed to "pour out of everything and embraced all the people we chose along the way." That is, their bond is so profound, it spills over to everyone else in their lives, much the way a loving couple's love spills over into their children. By the end of Suzy's life, Suzy is so close to both GF and N that they are jointly caring for her in her dying days. They bathe her together, because Suzy wants it that way, and N thinks it natural because they have both "known her naked body for a long time," both "seen that beloved body in all its phases." 

In the most striking image of the story, N describes herself and GF in a three-way union with Suzy as she lays dying: "My good friend and I would spoon Suzy, with her in the middle. We held hands, the three of us, and then we went to sleep. The children would tiptoe into the bedroom to take a closer look at those intertwined fingers, at our three hands joined at Suzy's hip. They suspected that there, hidden between our fingers, were all sorts of old things, things they'd only now realized and that would become too visible if they didn't do something to stop it." N believes that the children dislike seeing GF and N's "intimacy on top of her," but because their intimacy has a way of spilling out on top of everything, it can't help but do this.  

The children apparently believe that either their father and N always were in love with each other behind their backs, or that there was some type of swinging arrangement between their parents and their neighbors, N and her unnamed husband. Is there any chance that N is an unreliable narrator and the kids might be on to something? 

Do the kids know something about N that she doesn't want to admit to herself?

N's narrative style

Asking if N is an unreliable narrator raises a question: just what kind of narration are we reading? It's fairly similar to a diary or journal format. It's full of minor details of things, like which pastry shop she went to before her meeting with GF, how that shop differs from others, and the fact that she seems to have shrunk based on her difficulty reaching things on the shelf there. There are frequent digressions into her feelings on matters both great and small, much as one would do if the writing were only for one's own benefit. Twice, N refers to something she wrote earlier that isn't in the story we have in front of us, perhaps indicating that we are only reading a portion of her diary, the one for the day she goes to see GF for the first time after his injury. We know N keeps a diary, because she tells us that Raul once read nearly all of hers. Is that what we're reading?

If so, there are passages that complicate this possibility. Very early on she says there is "nothing new to report" about her roof tiles, the delivery of which have been delayed. If this were a diary, to whom would she be reporting? This might be simply dismissed as an idiosyncrasy of style in which she is reporting to her future self going back and reading her diary, but there are other passages that complicate this reading. At one point, when she is explaining how she views her relationship with GF, she says that "you would be wrong to imagine that" her conversations with GF were sad or melancholy. It's hard to argue that N would have addressed herself as "you" and then also instructed herself on how not to be mistaken in interpreting her own thoughts. The story seems to have an intended audience, and I don't think the "you" is the "royal you" of an author directly addressing us, the readers of the story in a literary journal or anthology. 

We already know that Raul read her diary. When he did, he complained to N that it was too full of her "innermost thoughts" and he asked her to put some action in it. We also know that N feels some animosity toward GF's children for the way they suspect her, although she assures them that she "loves them as always." Raul seems to get an especially large amount of her disdain. He ruined GF's morning ritual of reading the newspaper by telling him all the news before he got to it. Raul seems to be especially unaware of a rule N lives by, which is that some things are too precious to ruin by talking about them too directly. It's one reason GF remains unnamed throughout; he's too precious to her to name. Is it possible that what we are reading is N's diary, but her diary with the expectation that Raul will read it? That he will read it and share its contents with his siblings? Is it possible that this story is her "accidentally" shared narrative that will explain her relationship with GF to his children? After all, N confessed to a similar feeling with a book she was reading as Raul has with her diary--that it was too slow. Maybe she's decided to really give them something to talk about. 

Remains of the Day or something else?

There's one problem with trying to read the narrative as an accidentally-on-purpose shared diary entry: when the moment comes for GF to ask N to live with her, she says no, meaning there may not be anything for her to explain to the children. When GF asks her to move in, N feels like he has somehow violated the terms of their relationship. It isn't that he's looking at her as a replacement for Suzy. N is certain that this is the first day since his accident when his head has been clear enough he isn't confusing her for Suzy. When he asks her to move in, he first looks at a photo of his wife, and then he looks at her, indicating he knows the difference. She doesn't need to feel guilty that she's taking advantage of his senility to move in, but she still says no. Why?

Is this a Remains of the Day scenario, where she is missing out on a last chance for love? Is she denying that what she feels for GF might also encompass romantic love? Or is she right to try to keep their relationship where it has always been?

In spite of her initial rejection of the proposal, there's a hint that the relationship might be about to take on another element, although N needs a minute to warm to the idea. She looks at the photo of Suzy, and she thinks that "between the three of us there was a feeling of shared love, and not that same far-off love, our usual one." 

One of the kids interrupts this thought by calling GF, and the moment is lost, at least for that day. However, the story ends, as it began, by N talking about her long-delayed roof tiles. At the beginning, the clerk told her "all things in good time," and he was talking about his mother finding a late-life romance, but he also was referring to the roof tiles. The roof tiles are full of double meanings, then, and so they are at the story's end, too. At the end of the story, N intends to call back to find out about her tiles. She makes a special note about how long she's been waiting for the tiles, because she tends to forget for long she's been waiting for something after a good night's sleep. The double meaning, of course, is that she's been waiting on both tiles and for her relationship with GF to become something more, even if the something more isn't exactly romance and isn't something she can name. Or even wants to name.

When she calls the clerk, she intends to both find out about the tiles and also what movie the clerk's mother went with her boyfriend to see. Her interest in the woman's winter romance strongly suggests that she is also thinking about a change in her relationship with GF. 

"My Good Friend" is about how deep and meaningful and intimate and beautiful a relationship can sometimes become when nobody is concerned about what to call it. N's free-flowing narrative style reveals her free-flowing philosophy of life, where she takes what comes and rolls with it, without feeling the need to push things in certain ways according to her preconceived notions. The only word N uses to describe her feeling is love, but of course, love can encompass a lot of things. We love our kids, our pets, our spouses, our parents, our friends, our country, and Diet Pepsi, all in different ways. That means calling it "love" doesn't really pin it down to any one thing. The love between N and GF always included more than one kind of love, and if it is changing at story's end, it's only a continuation of the love they have always shared, a love so full it overflowed and included those around them. It will continue to not be named, though, because things that N values are not for naming. 

Interlude: Why "Our Share of Night" by Mariana Enriquez is not pulp and is worth your serious consideration

I'm going to get back to analyzing literature for this blog. I intend to start back soon, picking up where I left off with going through the Best Short Stories 2024, a.k.a. the O.Henry anthology. I stopped in February/March, when I was contemplating giving up the job I've had most of my adult life and stumbling blindly through finding something new. I'm still in the stumbling blind stage, as I haven't managed to find a new job yet, but I'm also a lot happier than I was four months ago. Not having a security clearance and all the bullshit that goes with it has been very liberating. I went to Canada last week, and I didn't have to ask for permission to do it. If my unemployment goes on much longer, this euphoria won't last, but for now, I feel content. Who knows what effect this might have on how I look at literature? Not being miserable might make me suck. I often think that most of what I've accomplished in my life has been motivated by spite. Without it, will I be like Prince Zuko without rage? 

Before I get back into the O.Henry stories, I wanted to whip out a quick post talking about a book I spent most of June reading. It's Our Share of Night (Nuestra Parte de Noche) by Mariana Enriquez. This will be a pretty light commentary compared to what I usually do, but I thought there were a few quick points worth making.

Background: the internet still sucks, and why it took me so long to read

I've been looking for jobs that involve using Spanish. Korean isn't terribly useful around here, but Spanish isn't. While I look, I'm also doing some volunteer work teaching English to Spanish-speaking immigrants. I thought I'd read a novel in Spanish to reinforce the other refresher work I've been doing. To choose a novel to read, I Googled this phrase:

"Las mejores novelas literarias de México de los 2020"

I discovered you had to specify "novelas literarias" because if you didn't, Google would think you meant a telenovela and give you information about that. The reason I asked for Mexican novels is because that's the main kind of Spanish of the people I work with. Well, actually, most are from Central America, but their Spanish is heavily influenced by Mexican Spanish, and I figured I'd have an easier time finding Mexican novels than Central American ones, so that's what I looked for. 

At this point, AI hallucinated and told me that Nuestra Parte de Noche was a highly regarded Mexican novel of the 2020s. It is, in fact, neither Mexican nor from the 2020s. It's an Argentinian novel--something you can't miss from very early on--and it's from 2019. Not realizing this, I bought the book for Kindle and started reading it and was a few pages in before I realized what I had bought. For some reason, I decided to keep going. 

Argentinian Spanish is its own beast, something the characters in the book allude to. It has a second person singular form that doesn't exist anywhere else, and it took me a while to get used to it. That's partly why it took me so long to read. Also, I was spending a lot of time applying for jobs and feeling stressed about it. 

I don't usually write about literature that everyone else has read, because I like to fill niches that aren't already filled. You can easily go find dozens of decent analyses of this book online. All I'll offer here is a quick bit of apologia for the book to anyone who might have read it and wondered why everyone had such high praise for it when it could be mistaken for trash.

Why it's not sensationalist pulp

You might read this novel and be tempted to think it's just a really long pulp horror novel. At least one of the villains, Mercedes, is borderline cartoonish in her evil. There is also a lot of sex. Like, a lot of it. Not really a whole lot of sexual scenes in detail, but just a lot of sex happening casually. Hetero sex, homo sex, drugged-up sex, orgiastic sex, it's all there. Past this cursory consideration of the novel's content, though, there's a profound meditation on the loss that comes from political calamity. 

The novel has countless people who are kidnapped and then used in ritual killings as part of a cult, or they are raised to become monsters like the "imbunche." This all takes place while in the background, Argentina lapses into a period of political tyranny where tens of thousands of people disappeared, taken by the government to languish in prisons, to be tortured, or to be killed. The period of the novel includes time before and after the military dictatorship, but because that is the period the novel begins in, it has more weight than the others. 

It's impossible to write a novel that really gets at the heart of what it means for an entire generation of a country to be impacted by the trauma of having loved ones just go missing and never reappear. This novel comes close, though, and it does it by incorporating the magical and the occult and also through its epic scale. 

There are two types of disappearances that take place in the novel. One is when the leaders of the cult kidnap people whom they suspect nobody will miss, either to sacrifice them to the darkness in cults or to raise them in cages to become monsters. The second type happens when the main characters discover an alternate dimension, one in which the darkness seems to live and to which the living sometimes find openings. 

Having the cult be "real," meaning its dark god they revere can actually wound or even take the lives of those in its presence, has implications for the real-world dictatorship whose presence is always in the novel's background but never fully revealed. It has a different kind of effect than it would if, say, the members of the cult were insane and sacrificing people to a god who isn't real. That effect is to weaken the dictatorship, to rob it of its power and majesty and its self-importance. The dictatorship isn't the real power in the world of the story; they're just one more government of many, all of which are manipulated by the members of the cult. Moreover, the power of all governments is dwarfed by that of the dark god they unknowingly serve, a power that is at times in the novel equated with nature. The novel manages, therefore, to both take seriously the trauma of having had a loved one disappear but also to remove the feeling of dread seriousness with which a dictatorship much clothe itself in order to succeed. 

Even the epic scale of the novel helps in this process of denying the military dictatorship this feeling of grandeur and self-importance. In the scope of history, the dictatorship was just a blip on the radar. 

However, that blip continues to have devastating psychological consequences for those who lost someone to the dictatorship. Throughout all of the horrors of the novel, the story manages to carve out space for real pathos in its human characters living with the guilt and pain of having had a loved one just disappear. The chapter "The Problem with Empty Houses, Buenos Aires 1985-1986" is the best part of the novel, and it builds with slow and perfect timing to the loss that defines one of the central characters of the book. Themes dealing with generational trauma are perhaps a bit overdone these days, but "Our Share of Night" manages to reanimate these themes with new feeling precisely by decentering human psychological trauma at points in the novel. By making human loss and the whirling currents that spin out from it small in comparison with the cosmic powers that cause that loss, we are able to feel what it is that makes human experience of loss so painful: our rediscovery of how nearly complete our lack of power is. This lack of power comes in two varieties: the lack of political power among the weak in comparison to authority, but also the lack of power of all humans before forces greater than us all.

This second type of weakness has two sides to it, and the other edge of the sword means that the very political authorities who imagine they are strong when they manage, for a time, to wield that power, will end up feeling the sting of that reverse side when the power inevitably turns against them. In a sense, the novel is a more powerful dismissal of political power than Shelley's "Ozymandias," because for Enriquez's overturned cruel tyrants, there isn't even a "colossal wreck" remaining as testament to a fallen power. There is only the disappearance into the nothingness of history of those who once made others disappear. 

That's about enough silence

The period of silence that has reigned over this blog for the last three months and change coincided with the end of my former career. In early March, I quit my job as a Korean translator and intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency. 

I didn't always love the job, but I felt some level of satisfaction in the belief I was good at it. The skill of understanding spoken and written texts and explaining their meaning, which I developed as a literature student and which has powered this blog, also made me uniquely built for the position. I was a decent translator, but moreover, I was adept at reporting what had been translated, and by being able to do both, it felt like it was somehow more than the sum of its parts. 

Since resigning, my family and I sold our house in Maryland, moved to Ohio where we are from, and I am currently looking for a new job. Although the deferred resignation program allowed me to continue receiving my salary until the end of September, that would have required me to be on administrative leave. It would have meant technically still being a part of the Department of Defense under Trump and Hegseth (NSA is part of the DoD). When I realized in early March that the deferred resignation program would allow people to move the date of their resignation up to any time they wanted, I sent HR notice that I wanted to resign that day. Then I took care of final administrative things and left. 

From the moment Trump was elected in November, I had a growing feeling of a moral obligation to leave my job. That grew as crazy talk from his camp increased leading up to his inauguration, and then it went into overdrive in the early days of him taking office. If it hadn't been for the deferred resignation, I'd have had to leave with no incentives, so in a way, it rescued me. Because of it, I was able to take early retirement. I don't want to act like I'm so noble I just walked away with nothing. I walked away with less than I could have, but not with nothing. I like to think I'd have resigned anyway, but I didn't have to test it. I now at least have a small pension to help out while I'm waiting to find a new job. It's not a ton, but here in Ohio, it'll go further than it would have in Maryland. I'll take a pension, because I'm not ashamed of the work I've done up to now, but I didn't want to keep getting paid my salary until the end of September, because I'd have been ashamed to continue to be a part of the DoD. 

The new job hunt isn't exactly going great; nobody in Ohio cares that I know a lot about North Korea. It would be better if I knew how a drop forge works. I can't even get interviews for a lot of entry-level positions. It was probably foolish to turn down all that free money, but it seemed right to me. By late February, some of the things that made me realize I needed to leave immediately were:

• Trump's executive order on transgender troops. Look, I've written on here before that I'm a liberal skeptic of some of what trans advocates are telling me. I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Trump spent so much money in October focusing on Harris's support for trans issues: because on some issues, like trans women in women's sports, there is a majority that opposes it. I honestly think that Democrats' refusal to move slower on trans issues is the reason Trump is president again. That being said, Trump went way beyond what was necessary in creating the order. He could have just said that gender dysmorphia was like other conditions that affect readiness, so the military can't allow it. Instead, he attacked the honesty and integrity of trans people who had volunteered for the military. It's the definition of dogma: treating your opinion like obvious fact, the way my sister-in-law talks about abortion. If trans identities are obviously made up, the order reasons, then anyone insisting on having one is obviously a liar. It's making trans people out to be morally corrupt and evil, instead of just too difficult for the military to treat. It was a dangerous demonization of a population.  
• The ambush of Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House, keeping in mind this is the guy running a country that was invaded.
• Just general talk of using the country's military to strongarm Greenland, Panama, or Canada made me not want to be anywhere near the DoD. That talk apparently isn't going away. 

I'm not judging anyone who stayed, nor am I judging anyone who took the admin leave as part of severance. I'm not speaking for anyone myself, or claiming I have special knowledge informing my decision because of my former job. My beliefs are based on nothing more than reading the same news anyone else could read. 

Many friends argued I should stay, based on the "one of the good guys" idea, that good people needed to remain in order to have at least some level of influence. Some people in government reason that we all serve the people, not the administration, and so doing whatever the administration asks is fine, unless it very clearly crosses legal boundaries. These arguments have their points, but I think something as outrageous as Trump II demands a tougher line, one less fraught with the possibility of putting me in a morally compromising position. Trump has made it clear he intends to push the boundaries of what is legal as far as he can get away with them, leaving civil servants to have to carry out a number of policies that are right on the border of what they should be doing. I didn't want to potentially be in such a position. And while every civil servant will have to work at some time during their career for policies they think are mistaken, there is a point at which those policies become so mistaken that I don't know how you can achieve the necessary separation from them to be part of carrying them out. I know that nobody will care that I left, and it won't be any skin off anyone's nose, nor will it change any discourse, but that isn't the point. I made a decision I could live with for my small life. 

A friend asked what made this administration so bad I had to leave, without even taking the severance pay. Surely I had tolerated questionable moral judgement from previous administrations, including the growth of drone attacks, which had no due process and which could sometimes hit innocent bystanders. Also, I stayed through Trump's first administration. 

As a matter of fact, during Trump's first administration, I was often the liberal in the room trying to get other liberals not to overreact. The first time, he spent most of his administration surrounded by grownups and trying to act like a semi-normal president. There is some merit to his criticisms of the neo-liberal world order, even if he's a terrible communicator of those criticisms and he has even worse proposals to offer as replacements. I actually liked his attempt to reach out to Kim Jong Un. I thought that whatever its faults, at least it was an attempt to do something different, and since nothing the U.S. had ever done with North Korea really worked, different was good. Until the final days of his term, I thought concerns about him wanting to be a king were overblown, and even after he did lose his marbles completely, he did, eventually, leave on his own. 

The reasons I left are also the reasons behind my shell-shocked "time for silence" post in March. This version of Trump is so obviously off the rails, so openly corrupt, I can't understand the lack of opposition from his own supporters. The only time he starts to face a real backlash is when tariffs look like enough of a reality the stock market crashes or people start to face the possibility of paying more for things they want. But if he gets Qatar to invest billions in his cryptocurrency and his business, that's too abstract for anyone to care about. It's so bad, I feel like I don't even understand the world, and my thoughts on it can't possibly have value. I couldn't have functioned professionally in that world, and I have a hard time even writing personally, when it seems like I've misread reality so completely.  

My plans for the future

Like I said, the job hunt isn't going great. An M.A. in English isn't a draw to employers. I don't have a teaching certificate, so I can't use my education for that. Even if I could, I have had an issue with my voice for a few years now that I can't seem to fix. My ENT said it was reflux-induced, but I've been taking antacids faithfully for years, and doing all the voice rehab exercises they prescribed, and I still often struggle to get my voice out. I had mentioned earlier that I might want to try blue collar work, but I have chronic foot pain that comes and goes, and recently I've had issues with my elbow, as well. I think both the foot and voice issues stem from the Marine Corps, but I never applied for disability, and now that it's been twenty-eight years since I was discharged, I will likely not be able to prove any service connection. Especially since the diagnoses I've gotten for both issues seem to suck and not help. I've had two job offers, both of which would be a challenge to my medical issues. We'll see how it all works out, but money's definitely going to be a concern again in a way it hasn't been for a long time. 

Now would be a great time, of course, for my writing career to suddenly take off. Sadly, it seems like I just keep missing the cut. I recently got another encouraging rejection from The New Yorker. This one said they weren't taking my story although "we continue to admire your writing." There's a lot to unpack in those six words. We? More than one person? Continue? So more than one person at TNY remembers who I am from one submission to the next and tracks it with some level of enthusiasm? It's certainly possible to make too much of a polite rejection, even though it's clearly more than a form rejection, but this does seem promising. However, I've gotten so many of these promising-seeming rejections from so many good outlets, it seems like that is now my level. I'm a not-quite-there writer. 

It's frustrating to me that I never made it, partly for reasons that every wanna-be writer would find true, but also because I feel like I have a novel draft that would be successful. I wrote a novel about NSA. Not a potboiler, and not even really a tell-all. It's more of a speculative, satirical novel. Like what Vonnegut would have written if he'd had my job. My writing resume isn't the best, but it includes wins in a few contests and about twenty short stories published in total. I can't believe that I can't send out a bunch of cover letters that say this is my writing resume, I worked at NSA, and I have a novel draft about NSA that's already been through pre-publication, and based on that find an agent willing to work with me. As it is, all I've gotten is the same we-like-it-but-it's-still-not-for-us line that seems to follow me everywhere. 

I'm confounded by it all, as I am by so many things these days. A decent book sale number is 3,000 copies. I feel like an NSA book would have that many more or less baked in. A lot of employees or former employees would buy it, as would people curious about it. Only one other NSA novel by a former employee has come out, as far as I know, and that one was kind of a rah-rah NSA book that wasn't very good. 

I tried to tell a different kind of truth in my novel. Maybe it's all a little too high-concept to pitch well, but my basic approach was this: I took the fictional country of Zendia, which NSA has used to teach basic analysis concepts for years, and I pretended that Zendia was actually a real country whose very existence is so secret that the government had to hide it. They chose to hide it in plain sight by pretending it was a made-up country and using it as an example for training. My main character is one of the few people read in to the very secret "Roman A Clef" project who knows that Zendia is real. He's a Zendian linguist, one of the few who still exist. By using a made-up country, I was free to talk about surveillance in ways I wouldn't have been able to if I'd used a real country. (I guess. This guy seemed to be able to talk about a whole lot I wouldn't think you'd be allowed to say.) 

My point wasn't really to do a tell-all about NSA. I was intentionally silly, because specific facts about NSA aren't really what matters to me. I wanted to take a deeper, more philosophical look at the notion of surveillance itself. Because I was once religious and will never really be free of magical thinking, I often let myself believe that writing this book was the whole reason I was put on the Earth. So when I think that this book will never happen, it's easy to start asking myself what, exactly, I'm doing here.

There are also concerns about what would happen if I ever did get the book published and it did succeed. NSA has a pre-publication requirement, and while the official policy makes it seem like it's not all that strict in terms of what you'd have to get pre-publication review for (not for something like this blog post, for example, because general thoughts about my life and NSA don't qualify as "official NSA  information"), I certainly have heard versions of my obligations while at NSA that would suggest I'd never be able to do an interview about the book without first getting all the questions and answers approved. It would make publicity kind of hard. 

Also, I'm kind of done with NSA. I'm ready to do something else. I don't really want to spend the rest of my life being "the NSA writer." If I could do the novel and move on, that would be great, but I have a feeling the novel would come out and that's who I'd be forever. I guess that's what happens if that really is my purpose for being here, but I'd also be happy if from this moment forward I never thought about NSA again.  

The future of the blog

As far as the future of this blog, I do really enjoy taking stories apart and showing how they work for readers who don't necessarily have the literary background to do it but who would still like to enter into a deeper relationship with texts. It's also nice to try my hand at reading something challenging and discuss that reading with other literary people. A few times in the last month, I've had the crazy idea to try to make this blog my job. I'd certainly have to switch platforms, I think. I might even have to turn it into a podcast, but if I did that, I think it would be a lot harder for people to find what they're looking for. The audience I have in mind has a job in something very non-literary, but they've picked up Best American Short Stories or something like it, and they're giving it a go. They get stuck and Google to see what they can find, and they spend five to twenty minutes on my blog, hopefully getting unstuck. A podcast is way harder to do that with. It's harder to skim and harder to tell ahead of time if it's what you want. 

Also, when you run a podcast or a blog you make a living off of, there's kind of a heavy sales element to your life. I haven't been assiduously avoiding sales work in my job hunt just to fall into it on my own. Having a podcast is like having a Mary Kay business: you don't have friends, only potential customers you socialize with. 

There are also some possible futures in front of me that would make continuing the blog difficult. I will probably need to go back to school if I don't want to work low-paying jobs the rest of my life. Law school is a possibility, but if I did that, law school would become my life, and I can't see finding the time to keep this blog up. I've been volunteering lately for the Immigrant Worker Project, tutoring in English. When I went in there to meet them, I spoke with the head of the IWP, who is a lawyer with the stereotypical piles of cases on his desk, working overtime lately to just try to get the government to follow basic due process with his clients. If my purpose in life isn't to write the great philosophical-satirical spy novel, helping people to keep working and keep living their lives isn't a bad alternative. I've been working at improving my Spanish (and quickly forgetting my Korean, which, sadly, I think has no future in my life) in order to be of more use to them. 

If not law school, I probably need to learn something else. There's a small chance, I guess, that I could try to finish my Ph.D. in English at Kent State and use that knowledge here on the blog, but that chance seems remote. Much like that chance that I'll ever find I have some actual special purpose in life. 

I recently heard Michael Lewis on a podcast talking about his book Who is Government? He had so much belief in the power of stories to change the world. He said it doesn't seem like there is change for the longest time, and then suddenly there is a whole lot of change at once. I don't know if I believe that, or if that's just something that people who traffic in stories tell themselves to feel better. It's certainly hard to explain the direction the world seems to be headed when there are all these great stories. If the problem isn't the stories, but the readings that given interpretive communities give to those stories, then I've been happy to try to improve the interpretive communities I am a part of. My optimism about the world varies wildly from day to day and month to month, which is why my willingness to throw myself into the blog and writing also varies along with it. Right now, it seems like maybe it's time to close the literary chapter while I'm closing other ones and worry about taking care of my family and tending my own garden. We'll see how I feel in the fall when BASS comes out again, this time under a new editor. 

For today, though, I didn't want the silence of bewilderment to be the last word on this blog. Consider this my contribution, pointless as it is, on this day when so many are pushing back against the possibility of kings here in America. 

A time to be silent

Whatever it is I've been doing, I don't think it's working. 

I've exhausted myself most of my life to try to understand the world, but as I look out at it now, I don't understand anything. The things I'd come to believe tell me that we shouldn't be here, but here we are. 

A major part of my regimen to understand the world has been reading, studying, and writing fiction. That must be where at least a big part of the problem lies. I know I've said many times on here before I would stop writing or blogging, but I think now is different. I have a unique opportunity to remake myself, to turn aside from all the projects I've been working on and go in a totally new direction. 

When you realize that you don't understand anything, I think it's appropriate to be silent. I'm going to take time to see what silence teaches me. I know some will say that times like these call for speaking up, rather than silence, but I don't believe my speaking up has ever done any good, so I'm just going to try something else and see how that goes. I intend to make this an all-encompassing discipline, almost monastic. If it works out, I'd even like to pick an occupation that makes long periods of silence possible, something blue-collar. I don't have much ability in this realm, and I'm kind of old now for that kind of work, but I'd like to try. 

I think this might really and for real be the last post I make, after all the previous threats to not post anymore. Thanks to those who've shared a quest to understand stories with me. If there is any power behind the universe with power and will to intercede, I'd ask it to show pity and mercy to us lost humans trying to figure out the world and caught up going along for the ride on an attraction we didn't volunteer to get on. I'd couple that appeal with one to anyone reading this to also show pity and mercy toward those stumbling through life alongside us. 

"Junior" by Katherine D. Stutzman (O.Henry Anthology)

Once upon a time, when the influence of the American New Critics was at its height, it was considered de rigeur that a work of literary art should have an ending that called back to the beginning. Above all, a work should feel whole and unitary, the critics of that era felt. This is no longer considered a necessity, but it is still nice to find a work that feels as whole as "Junior" by Katherine D. Stutzman. It makes it easy to understand why critics have felt this was such an important goal to strive for. 

Nearly all of the story has a very limited scenery. It almost all takes place at the farm along the Herne River where Junior has lived his whole life. Junior takes care of cows and his father in equal measure. When he finds out that the Herne is going to be dammed up and the town of Willards Mill flooded, "Junior Ogilvy does not alter his routine." 

That opening line of the story could well serve as a synopsis for all of it, in that most of the slow drama in the story involves Junior trying to maintain equilibrium and normalcy as his town is about to disappear, along with his farm, his way of life, and, it so happens, his father, who is dying in the room upstairs. Junior and his father are a perfect example of individuals trying to live their private lives when something big and public comes along to interrupt them. In this case, there has evidently been some kind of eminent domain claim made on the land where they live that means they will have to move. It's the sort of event that reminds those affected how contingent everything in life is, how the things we've done for so long that we not only take them for granted, but even take for granted taking them for granted, can be taken from us. It's a reminder that there is a public and political side to life even for those trying the hardest to keep it out and live privately. 

"Try to keep it out" is what Junior does to the very last. There is a great moment when he gets a letter from a sister he hardly knows. She lives at Fort Drum in New York, where she is married to a soldier. She is offering to bring their father to live with her, since Willards Mill is about to be flooded. She can provide for the old man's comfort while Junior goes off to make a new life for himself. It's a very fair and thoughtful offer, but Junior can't bring himself to accept it. He can't even respond, because responding would be acknowledging that the thing is about to happen. When he first gets the letter, he "does so in the morning, feeling that it will be better to carry the letter's contents out into the cold, into the barn, among the cows with their breath steaming from their nostrils, rather than carrying it into his little room under the stairs and into his sleep." He physically removes the letter as far from his inner life as he can, hoping this will also keep it emotionally and psychologically removed. 

This story reminds me of TMBG's best album

Junior isn't in complete denial. He worries that his father might not die before they have to leave. He sells his herd, knowing they can't stay. He does prepare for leaving on some level, including building a coffin for his father with the scraps of lumber left at the Willards Mill hardware store. He sees signs all around him of other people preparing to leave, and he knows he will have to, as well, and soon. Nonetheless, he stays until almost the very end, until at last his father dies and he can put him in the coffin he built. He puts the coffin on the cart he used to use for carrying milk, and he heads off. Here is where the end loops back to the beginning so neatly: "When at last Junior Ogilvy leaves Willards Mill, he does not go down through town and away along the River Road. He walks beside his mule out behind the farmhouse and across the pasture. He will find his way up and over the hill, to another valley, to a place where he can put his father into the ground and begin again." 

The beginning of the story was Junior trying to maintain normalcy as the big world was forcing change upon him. The end is him determined to reestablish a new normalcy after enduring the change. Junior is an incredibly normal and unremarkable person--even the name "Junior" suggests that he is not original--but his determination to continue on with his normal life, to find meaning in it for himself, is admirable. In a setting largely circumscribed by the shabby furniture of his bedroom or the bleak landscape seen from the window or the cold air of the barn, Junior struggles to make it all mean something and to remain steadfast in his belief in what it means. 

Aside one

Let's be honest. For most of human history, and very much including the present, country folk have been conservative and city folk have represented change. Pastoral settings are the site of people with traditional morality, while cities contain those with a more flexible moral vision. Free-thinking city folks tend to either idealize the country or to belittle it. When they are belittling it, it's by calling its denizens things like "xenophobic." 

Junior doesn't spend much timing musing about outsiders. The story takes place less than a year after the end of World War I, but Junior doesn't even consider this fact. He doesn't waste any breath or thought cursing those city slickers who came up with the idea to flood the valley, undoubtedly to build something that will benefit them and not him. But I think we can understand why someone in Junior's position might be a little suspect of outsiders. Part of the psyche of working the land, I suppose, is to believe in the importance of permanence. Putting all that work into the soil would be impossible if one didn't believe things would be more or less the same tomorrow as they are today. Putting this story in Junior's perspective makes the supposed "xenophobia" of country dwellers a little easier to understand, because there isn't much that comes from outside that is really there for their benefit. 

Aside two (the Internet sucks now) 

Where the hell was Willards Mill? Where is the Herne River? A Google search, which is now more about Google's AI than its old algorithms, keeps insisting I mean the Rhine in Germany, which apparently goes by a town called Herne. I cannot convince it that this isn't what I mean. The story is pretty clearly not in Germany, not with a town called "Willards Mill" and a complete lack of mention of the war. If I try to search Willards Mill, I get deluged (hahahhaha deluged) with stuff about a fictional town from some show called "Stan Against Evil." Flipping it all around and adding in terms about flooding and so on doesn't improve my results. The Internet sucks now, because it's trying to think for me, and it won't believe me if I try to tell it that's not what I'm thinking of. 

So either this is historical fiction set in a town someone in the U.S. with a local history known only to those from the area, or this is a completely made-up episode. It doesn't really matter too much to me, but I do wish I had more confidence that the Internet wasn't ganging up on me to make it harder to find out.  

Obviously, my O'Henry read-through is delayed

This is just a note to say that I realize it's been a while since I last posted. I do intend to try to get back to the short story anthology blog-through soon. Just been a lot going on personally the last few weeks. Like, a lot. I know I'm not unusual to be going through stuff, and generally, I've got it okay. I'd say I'm grateful, but it always seems weird to me to be grateful when, as an agnostic, I have no object of gratitude. I guess I'm just grateful to the universe, although that never feels quite right, either, because part of gratefulness is that I have it better than most, which is sort of including the relative badness that others endure as part of being thankful. So maybe not grateful, but more that I acknowledge my relative good fortune. I apologize for having been self-indulgently self-pitying at times on this blog, although I guess that goes with the territory of being a writer sometimes.

I will attempt to both get back to the literary analysis soon and to be a better person in general. It's never clear to me if those two things are linked, if reading literature closely can help one to be a better person of if it's actually the opposite, and literature is bad for one's moral development. In any event, I'm going to try to accomplish both things, and soon. Thanks for reading.  

 

This story might as well be written by AI: "Hiding Spot" by Caroline Kim (O.Henry Anthology)

"Hiding Spot" is a boilerplate, familiar-to-the-point-of-tedium, well-worn story of Korean immigrants. If you were to create a "Korean immigrant story" bingo card ahead of reading it, you'd be yelling "bingo" in very short order. We have: Korean immigrants who hide valuables in the house, a Korean mom and dad who run a dry cleaning business, a dol (a party thrown when a child turns one), and old Korean parents who go to church and are disappointed in their child. It's full of the kinds of Korean cultural markers that would be part of a one-hour introduction to Korea class. They might as well serve bulgogi and kimchi with it. 

The few times the story starts to introduce something interesting or insightful about Korean-American life, it doesn't keep pulling the thread. There is a part where Mrs. Lee observes that Americans think you need special breakfast food for breakfast, but Koreans just eat soup and rice or whatever they were eating the night before. Okay, but what of it? Stay with that for a second. Likewise, we see Mr. Lee reading Chosun Ilbo, maybe the most conservative of the mainline Korean newspapers. You can't have him reading that and not have it matter, but it doesn't. Other than disappointment in his son for being a drug addict, Mr. Lee doesn't show any real conservative tendencies. He's old-person conservative, not politically so. 

In the end, it's another story where immigrants and their families in America have psychological issues because of a divided identity. That's got to be the most common theme in immigrant literature. This story is linguistically dull and uninventive and overall lacks any ambition. It's a story that's been told a thousand times, and not in terribly different words. It's the second story from the New England Review I've read written by a Korean-American writer about Korean-American life, and both times I felt that the editorial staff got duped by a dull story that they couldn't tell was dull.  

Solidarity is a pipe dream: "Serranos" by Francisco Gonzalez (O.Henry Anthology 2024)

I've fallen behind on my analysis of stories from the 2024 Best Short Stories collection, a.k.a. the O.Henry Prize Winners anthology. It's been a trying time. I'm going to try to push through. This is going to be a half-assed post. The next few might be. Apropos of nothing, I'm looking for a new job, and if you happen to think I'm an amazing writer and know someone willing to offer anything remotely reasonable for this golden ergonomic keyboard of mine, please let me know. 

Two groups that should be on the same side and aren't

That's "Serranos" in a nutshell. There's the old school undocumented laborers who live in Ranch View Mobile Estates, the ones who work in a vineyard serving rich people, and the new school "Serranos" from the highlands back home who move into the Holiday Rambler next to all of the older laborers. The Serranos aren't circumspect like the old schoolers; they are loud and proud and set of fireworks on Fourth of July and play loud music and put American flags on the backs of their bikes that they ride to their jobs at the Greek restaurant. 

The children of the lowlanders admire the Serranos. Because the children have citizenship (for now! Stay tuned to see how this 14th Amendment drama shakes out!), they aren't as timid as their parents, and they like that the Serranos aren't timid, either. The children resent the parents for being--in their view--jealous of the freewheeling nature of the Serranos. The lowlanders begin to want the Serranos out, because their behavior draws too much attention. Although the mother figure among the Serranos, "Mother Paz" eventually charms the lowlanders with her southern-style tamales, and the elders finally appreciate the raw "sincerity" of the Serranos, the damage has already been done.  The Serranos are eventually picked up by Immigration before any real bond of solidarity can form. The old-timers become even more cautious not to be noticed. One day, before heading off to work, the lowlanders see Mother Paz back at Ranch View. She slips quietly into the Holiday Rambler. The old-timers recognize their fears toward their neighbors, how it was "easy to hate them," but they "couldn't bear to love them." They knock on her door in a belated, small gesture of understanding. 

It seems like nearly every best-of short story anthology has at least one hard-luck Latino story. This one stands out for the realistic way it portrays how people under stress actually behave, which isn't always nobly. There are too many things to worry about to be noble. The point of view of the narrator, the first-person plural "we/us," is always a loaded one. It can emphasize community by making all of the characters in the story belong together, or it can emphasize the opposite, which is polarity, because "we/us' implies a "they/them" who aren't part of the community. That's how it was in "The Little Widow from the Capital" by Yohanca Delgado. This story's use of we/us is also the latter type of use. 

The vast majority of people on the globe have every reason to work together to make their lives better, and yet it seldom happens. If it does happen, it usually happens too late to do much except remember. This story is incredibly timely, probably too timely. I should probably switch to reading werewolf romances for a while. 

The best lines from the Lord of the Rings movies that aren't in the books

Many years ago now, I wrote about the ten things from the Lord of the Rings movies that drove me the craziest. They mostly involved changes to the books that I thought departed thematically from their source material, rather than just on a straight plot level, to the ruin of all. Since the coming week is going to feature both the second coming of a man I can't believe was ever taken seriously as the chief civil servant along with super cold temperatures, it's going to be a bleak couple of days. I thought I'd try to inject a little hope by returning to the work that I think is more about hope than any other I've ever read seriously, which is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. As Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey said, if there is one image that best captures what LoTR is about, it's a trumpet braying in defiance. So let's defy this week by considering Tolkien and the movies he inspired a little bit. 

Since the goal this week is to spread hope, I'd like to find something to celebrate in Jackson's trilogy, rather than something to be annoyed by. If earlier, I wrote about changes to the source material that I thought changed the theme in ruinous ways, this time, I'll write about good changes made that were appropriate to the medium of film, changes that either preserved the original themes or even advanced them in new ways.

Here are the rules

I'm only dealing with new material on a dialogue level, meaning I'm looking for best lines that are in the movies that aren't in the books. Of course, with Jackson's movies, "not in the books" is a little bit difficult to decide upon. A characteristic of all three movies is that they often include dialogue that is in the books somewhere, but not in the place where it appears in the movie, or even in the exact words or spoken by the same character. 

One example is the very opening lines of the movie. There is a voiceover by Galadriel that begins, "The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air." In the book, these lines are spoken almost exactly like the ones in the movie, but they are spoken TO Galadriel, not by her. It is the Ent Treebeard who says them. And he isn't saying them near the beginning of the story, but near the very end, after the ring has been destroyed.  

A second example is spoken by Gandalf to Pippin to comfort him as he is afraid during the battle with Mordor in Minas Tirith. Pippin says he didn't think it would end like this, and Gandalf says: 

"End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it....White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Part of this is invented whole cloth, and part of it is taken from narration, not spoken dialogue, that occurs early in the books. Frodo is in the house of Tom Bombadil (a section that I think was wisely excised from the movies), and Frodo has a dream. In the dream, he sees a pale light..."growing to turn the veil (of rain) all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise." Much later in the book, we realize that this was foreshadowing Frodo's journey across the sea to Valinor, because once he is away, he recalls the dream, only now he adds "white shores" to it. So in the movie, Gandalf is making explicit what the books only ever hint at darkly, which is some hope of a destiny beyond death for humans and hobbits.

It's sort of a subjective call, then, to decide whether lines from the movies are "not in the books" or they are. I don't aim to be consistent. If it feels to me like the line is new enough, I'll count it.

As far as criteria for best, that is subjective, too, obviously, but I'm looking for something that stands on its own as good enough dialogue that it was worth inventing it. The line should reveal character, move the plot, or develop the themes of the story. I will also be awarding bonus points if the line in question has become a fruitful source of LoTR-related memes. I'm not a huge meme fan for the most part, but the memes from LoTR are still top-notch twenty-five years later, and I will honor some of the lines for having created their own secondary art form. 

The list

These are in no particular order, except for the last two, which I consider the best.

What about second breakfast?

This line, spoken by Pippin before he has quite processed what it means to have agreed to accompany Frodo on his flight from the Shire, does a great job of establishing both Pippin's pre-heroic-journey priorities as well as developing our understanding of hobbit lives. The list he enumerates after second breakfast of other hobbit meals often forms the backbone of the menu during LoTR watch parties. The line is loveable and funny and comes with a good sight gag from a mildly annoyed, mildly amused Strider. Sadly, the expression "second breakfast" is not in the books at all, although you could easily infer its existence from both LoTR and The Hobbit. 

One does not simply walk into Mordor

The king of all meme-creating lines. The king of all lines from the movies that one ends up twisting into other sayings in real life. The king of lines that show us the temperament of Boromir, who is brave and noble, but who thinks that everyone not from Gondor just doesn't know shit about what it's like to face real fucking combat, man, so fuck all you civilians. 

...and I'm coming with you!

Ah, Sam. Such a familiar character from the moment we meet him, and yet so true and faithful that by the time the story is over, he's taken the archetype he fits into and broken it and remade it into his own image. When Frodo tells Sam that he is going to Mordor alone, Sam's response, "Of course you are, and I'm coming with you," tells us many things about Sam. One, it tells us that he had already guessed Frodo's mind, which he usually does. Second, it tells us everything we need to know about what Sam's core principles are and where his head is going to be at for the rest of the movies. 

I've said before that one thing I don't like about the movies is that they switched many characters from having a flat arc to a positive one, because that's what movies usually do. Aragorn is the biggest example. But Sam is the one character whose pre-adventure character is the same as it is at the end. Except for maybe getting up the courage to ask Rosie Cotton to dance. 

I would have followed you....my captain, my king

I used to be kind of indifferent to these lines, but they've grown on me. It's important that Boromir isn't just a throwaway character who is only there to convince viewers that the ring really can corrupt and that maybe not everyone will get to live to the end of the story. Boromir deserves to be mourned, and it's worth taking a beat to acknowledge that he was a worthy man done in by evil. In the books, the three walkers Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli take an insane amount or time, under the circumstances, to sing a funeral song for him. I think the movie is right to redeem him fully in the eyes of the audience by telling us that if it had come to it, he would ultimately have welcomed the return of the king.

Those without swords can still die upon them

This is one of those lines I'm taking liberty with, because Eowyn does say them in the book, but in a very different place. She says these lines while in the houses of healing in Gondor after she awesomely slays the Witchking of Angmar because he is the absolute baddest of bad asses in Tokien's supposedly misogynistic story. She wants to go out and join those assaulting the Black Gate, and she is frustrated that her healers will not allow her to go. I think the movies needed to leave out most of the houses of healing scenes just for time purposes, but it was important that they include this line somewhere. Having Eowyn say it to Aragorn allows us to know her mind before and during her fateful decisions, rather than after. 

I have been working on and off for a while on a long paper concerning disobedience to orders in LoTR. There are at least five times in the story where someone disobeys an order and if they had not done so, Frodo's quest would have failed. Eowyn is as good an example as any, and this line shows that she has the clear, internal moral vision that is necessary to make the incredibly difficult decision to follow one's internal orders over those of authority. 

Elrond's warning to his daughter that Aragorn will still die

Holy Jesus, if you want to read something sad, read the full story of Arwen and Aragorn's love from the annexes to Return of the King. In the movie, Elrond is borrowing from that part of the annex. I was glad that it was worked into the movies in some way, and I also love the use of some of Tolkien's archaic, noble language here, the reference to the enormous past that Middle Earth has had, as in "splendor of the kings of men undimmed before the breaking of the world." I'm not a huge fan of a lot of choices the movies made with Aragorn and Arwen, either individually or as a couple, but I was fine with adding in Elrond's resistance to their marriage mostly because it led to this insertion. 

There won't be a Shire, Pip

Of the three movies in the trilogy, Two Towers is easily the weakest. There are some questionable choices of manufactured conflicts meant to give arcs to characters. One of those conflicts is the one the two "other" hobbits, Pippin and Merry, face. They stumble across Ents, who are very strong and could be powerful allies in the war. They try to convince the Ents to join the war, but the Ents originally aren't interested. They eventually change their minds, but in the space between the Ents' decision to sit out the war and the decision to get involved, Pippin thinks that maybe he and Merry should just hightail it back to the peaceful Shire. Merry rightly observes that unless evil is stopped, the Shire will soon be as bad as everywhere else. 

I've said this line about a million times, every time someone brings up leaving the U.S. now that Trump is president again. The fires of Isengard will spread unless they are stopped where they are. This isn't quite explicit in the books, mostly because the Ents never actually reject the notion of going to war, but I was fine with making it more of an explicit theme in the movies. I think Tolkien would have agreed with the sentiment. With confronting all manner of evil, there are times to "fly, you fools," and there are times to turn and confront the evil. 

So it begins

This isn't an especially good line. It's kind of boilerplate action movie fare. Chosen for its extreme memeability alone. 

Share the load

Also chosen mostly because of the memes it has inspired. I’m not a terribly huge fan of how the Smeagol/Sam/Frodo relationship is made into a love triangle in the movies. This line is part of that whole indulgence, but at least it’s one that leads to funny comments.

I give hope to men/I keep none for myself

I'm not the only person not crazy about how Aragorn is changed in the movies from a guy who knew he wanted to be king to a guy with a crisis of identity because he doesn't want to be one. So I don't really like that one scene that many people love where Elrond comes to Aragorn to give him the sword (that he had already had for two whole books in Tolkien's version) and convince him to "put away the ranger" and "become the king you were born to be." 

However, that scene does contain another reference pulled from the appendices. It's actually Aragorn's mother who said she kept no hope for herself, although she had given it to men by bearing Aragorn. (Aragorn's name as a child is Estel, meaning "hope.") I said above that LoTR is more about hope than any story I've ever thought about a lot, and it is, but part of its message concerning hope is that a realistic appraisal of the world will mean having to carry on without hope sometimes. I just can't think of a better message for this week.

Pippin's "Home is Behind" song to Denethor

If you've read the books, you know they're just crammed full of songs. It would have been impossible to put even a quarter of them into the movies, but the movies do want to reassure viewers who love the books that yes, they're aware that it's sad to leave all of that out. There are a few moments when the songs and poems work their way in, even if in shortened form. Aragorn sings part of the Lay of Luthien, and he also sings of the ancient story of how his ancestors arrived upon the shores of Middle Earth. Treebeard sing-songs about the lost Ent-wives. Maybe the best use of the musical/poetic material from the books is when Pippin sings for Denethor, who has lost most of his mind and is about to lose the rest. Once again, the writers of the movies wove the song in from other places in the books. In the books, Pippin still sings the lines heard in the movie, but in a very different context. He sings them while the hobbits are traveling and still in the Shire, not yet fully aware of their peril. 

The song in its full version from the book concerns a traveler who is thinking about all of the places in the world he hasn't gone yet, and the traveler decides for the moment to delay seeing them and to head home to fire and lamp and meat and bread. In the movie, using only that one verse from the song, it takes on a different meaning. Tolkien used some songs repeatedly in his work, changing them slightly as the context of the story changed, and the movies did the same thing. "Home is Behind" was the best example of it, and so I single it out here as an example of something the movies do well throughout. 

The journey doesn't end here

I wrote about this one in the introduction above. I'm okay with making the movies more overtly Christian-ish and marginally less pagan-ish. It's there in the books, just not quite so confidently stated. If anyone is going to tell humans and hobbits that there is a chance they survive death in some way, it's Olorin-Gandalf, who learned mercy from Nienna herself. Although Tolkien's legendarium is pretty vague on the fate of men beyond death, I think it's possible Gandalf actually knows what he's talking about. Nienna was the sister to Mandos, sort of the Hades of Tolkien's world, and she lived on the borders of Mandos' kingdom. It's possible Gandalf wasn't just making that up to make Pippin feel better. 

That still only counts as one

Most of Gimli's D&D dwarf yuk-yuking in the movies annoys me. This one doesn't.  

Aragorn's inspirational speech at the black gates

Almost none of this is in the books. The one line that is, "Stand, Men of the West," has a totally different meaning. Aragorn isn't saying "stand your ground and fight," he's instead saying, "Look, Frodo just finished the quest, so quit fighting and stand still." I don't find this speech all that great, and Viggo Mortenson's voice sounds a little funny in parts, but I think it was probably important to show Aragorn being, I don't know, kingly in battle or something. Since they had to write a speech from scratch, they did a good job of at least making it sort of within Aragorn's character, understanding the weakness of others and trying to reason with them rather than order them. 

Okay...now the two best ones

Second place: A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.

Wait...this isn't in the books? The line feels so natural in the movie, it seems like it must be in the books, but it isn't. When I heard this line in the movie way back in the day, I felt like I was home, and I enjoyed the ride for the next three hours. But it's not in the books. Check me on this. 

There are some observations in the books on how Gandalf comes and goes as he pleases. Maybe the closest the books come to the pith of what Gandalf says is when Gandalf arrives in the nick of time at the Battle of Helm's Deep. Aragorn, meeting Gandalf at last, says to him that "Once more you come in the hour of need, unlooked-for." Gandalf replies that it shouldn't be "unlooked for," because he had said that he would return and meet him here. In other words, you should have trusted that I would show up when I was needed. 

I'm not sure what made the movie's writers put this line in. Maybe after reading and re-reading the story, they themselves were struck by how many times Gandalf seems to arrive just in the nick of time. It's certainly true in The Hobbit. 

It's also sort of a foreshadowing. Gandalf is NEVER late, but later on, he's not going to show up when he promised Frodo that he would. He 'broke tryst" as he will say at the Council of Elrond, and that has never happened before. So it's setting up what happens later, which Tolkien does all the time. Oh, yeah, and it also establishes that Frodo is one of the few people close enough to Gandalf to be able to trade banter with him. Great addition. 

First place: My friends! You bow to no one. 

I get angry in the books when the hobbits go back to the Shire and nobody seems to understand that Frodo is the goddamn savior of the planet. I know, I know. It has to be that way. Frodo even says so, in some of the most poignant words of the whole trilogy: "I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them." But do all those dumb hobbits really have to go about not realizing who Frodo is? It angers Sam, and it angers me, too. 

Frodo may be stoic about not fitting in around the Shire when he comes back, and of course, he never wanted to be treated like a hero. But he is a hero. He's the hero of heroes. 

The book does grant him a good deal of being treated like the hero he deserves, just not in the Shire. When he awakes after nearly perishing in the fires of Mount Doom after completing the quest, Frodo is told of the honor he and Frodo will be held in: "The clothes that you wore on your way to Mordor...even the orc-rags that your bore in the black land, Frodo, shall be preserved. No silks and linens, nor any armour or heraldry could be more honourable." There are festivals in honor of Frodo and Sam, and minstrels write songs about them, and the people go so far as to use quasi-religious terms about them: "Praise them with great praise!" 

The movie was never going to include a long segment on the Scouring of the Shire or all the other things that happened in the books to the hobbits when they returned home. It wasn't going to have a segment with a minstrel singing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" (although the much shorter animated version did include this song). But you know what? Frodo suffered for our salvation. He deserves his moment. So does Sam. If Merry and Pippin happen to get honored along with them, fine. They're kinsmen of Frodo. His kinsmen can have my praise and thanks, too, just for having been related to him. It's a necessary scene, not so much for the movie, but for me to feel whole. There is a moment when everyone recognizes that in spite of all the heroism that went on, the only two real heroes are the ones who slogged it out to the finish line in a land far beyond hope.