In her interview with the New Yorker right after publishing the short story ‘Two Men Arrive in A Village,’ Zadie Smith discussed, among other things, the inspiration for this story. She mentioned the idea of eliminating specifics in storytelling in a way that allows a story to implicate everybody. In her words,
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Joycean epiphany: one of those often subtle but definitive moments after which life is never quite the same again. All of us, or a majority of us, have felt it. We discuss it so often as a literary effect that we forget how accurately it depicts human beings’ experience with change.
To some extent this translates to the way we shape our memories; editing as we go and forgetting some details . Just like in James Joyce’s short story Araby, a grown man remembering a single night with a mixture of scorn and tenderness, a night when his childhood and adolescence naivety is shed and replaced with anguish.
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Feminist literature has come a long way and I am still amazed by authors, especially female, who still keep at it. This is the kind of writing that uses language and literature to highlight social, economic, political, among other aspects, rights for women.
Literary works vary in how they explore this issue and are often categorized in theories and feminism waves/periods. In most cases, the change in advocacy methods rises at certain times in history and are often influenced by the political and social activities at their peak around that time.
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When Cristina Huenriquez’ short story ‘Everything is Far From Here’ was published in The New Yorker’s July 2017 issue, there was so much buzz among its discussions.
An immigrant mother is separated from her young son as they cross the border. She arrives at the immigration camp earlier than her son and the rest of her time is spent worrying about him. At one point, her anguish gets the best of her and worries that she can no longer recognize her son. At another, she confuses a random boy with her son. When it is too much, she screams and the guards have to put her in confinement. She vows to stay here until her son comes.
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Numerous authors have opined Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown“, each with a new perspective or an improvement of their former. While it is not a much explored topic, avid readers of Hawthorne can attest to the author’s regular use of humor and satire to address human follies.
Now, combining this kind of humor and an ironic attack on (Puritanism) religious practices gives us humor as a standalone linguistic device that is both symbolic and thematic in this story.
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Given a chance, would you want to know the exact date of your death, minus its circumstances? How do you think such information would affect you and your loved ones? Typically, curiosity is likely to drive many people to inquire about their death date, but the mere fear and thought of death at its mention would tame this same curiosity.
Human beings are subject to death. This bitter realization of our inability to achieve immortality in the near future has resorted to scientific innovations like anti-ageing technology. In Helen Phillips’ world, technology can tell people their date of death.
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