The Five-Forty-Eight (Characterization)

The Five-Forty-Eight by John Cheever is a story that shows the relationship between two kinds of people. Miss Dent is Blake’s stalker and a mentally ill and emotionally unstable woman. Blake is a businessman, gets his “manliness” from those who are weak, confident that there will not be any consequences. After Blake hires Miss Dent (when she is trying to overcome her mental illness), he toils with her emotions, and leaves her jobless, and alone. The Five-Forty-Eight reflects the relationship between oppressors and the oppressed, and how sometimes, the oppressed fight back for total revenge. The characterization of Blake clearly shows the unjust treatment of an oppressor.

Blake is introduced as an overconfident powerful man, who already parallels an oppressor. When the reader is introduced to Blake, he is very confident. When he leaves his office, he notices his stalker, and wonders why she is following him, but seems distracted by the recent construction and window displays to think about her long enough to worry. For the moment that he did think about her, he thinks to himself that, “She was not clever. She would be easy to shake” (80). He sees himself as a superior to Miss Dent. Blake thinks that maybe she was “misled, lonely perhaps” (80). This is the first step in oppressing, thinking that one is on a higher level than Ms. Dent. While in the bar that he stops at, Blake tries to remember his stalker’s name-“Miss Dent, Miss Bent, Miss Lent” (80). The characterization of Blake shows how he can live with himself after the way he treats women. To him, people with low self esteem are not people. He dehumanizes them to the point where they are all nameless. Cheever makes a point in general about how people with power abuse it to dehumanize others.

In this story, the oppressed fight back, making a bold statement for the oppressor to see what it felt like. After realizing he has missed his train, Blake tries to catch the local five-forty-eight. Thinking he has lost his stalker, he boards the train, and uses the evening paper to “avoid speculation or remorse about her.” (83) “Mr. Blake”, he hears her voice from above him, and suddenly he remembers her name. Miss Dent. To the reader, Miss Dent is becoming seemingly more dangerous. Blake still thinks he has the power to manipulate her. But it didn’t take long for him to realize that Miss Dent was serious, with a pistol aiming at his direction, she was not afraid to shoot. It is clear that there has been a role reversal. Blake is now the weak one, the one who is being dehumanized and under a strong influence of power. The consequences of Blake’s actions have finally come back to set him straight. Miss Dent, even mentally tormented, finds the strength to stand up to the person who caused her emotional trouble and pain.

Miss Dent’s corrected misconceptions about Blake motivate her to act. When she first met Blake, she imagined his life to be “full of friendships, money, and a large and loving family” (81). However, after Miss Dent sees Blake’s weakness and heartlessness, and once the train stops in Shady Hill, she realizes Blake’s life was not what she had pictured. After having just been held at gunpoint with his face down in the dirt, Blake “got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen and walked home” (89). Characterizing Blake as a dominant, power abusing person allows the readers to conclude that he represents the oppressors. In the end, the readers saw that the oppressed get revenge, making a bold statement about what happens to those who abuse power.

A Rose for Emily (Point of View)

The narrator of A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner tells the story of Miss Emily Grierson, a lonely woman who ends up with a tragic death. Miss Emily was portrayed as a woman who was unwilling to change. When she found out about Homer Barron’s lack of feelings for her, she killed him in order to keep the romance alive. There’s no doubt that the climax of her sleeping with Homer’s dead body can creep one out. But in this short story, Faulkner really wants to make the readers speculate on the psychology of the mind, or what made Miss Emily act the way she did. And by having the narrator know the whole story before he tells it, he is able to use flashbacks and foreshadowing, which changes the reader’s view on Faulkner’s purpose.

The narrator in this short story is a person who lives in Miss Emily’s town, possibly a neighbor. He constantly speaks collectively, as if representing the whole town. This is evident in the first sentence when he says, “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral…” (26). The “our” in that sentence adds him as a part of the town, along with the other times he says “we,” “ours” and “us”. So right off the bat, we know that the narrator has probably been around Miss Emily for quite some time (as long as he’s lived in the town), letting the readers know in advance that he will include the information necessary to get his point across.

Throughout the story, the narrator uses flashbacks and foreshadowing, but never speaks in the present tense, as if he was watching what he was describing. The first part of the story tells of the time “when Miss Emily Grierson died…” (26) which is explained in more detail at the very end of the story. Then it switches to telling the story of the events that happened right before she died; “Alive, Miss Emily…” (26). The act of changing the view makes our minds toggle back and forth, adding suspense to the story. At the beginning, we know that she dies, so there must be another important event that we still do not know, creating that suspense.

The point of view that Faulkner chose in this story was effectively beneficial. If the story was told chronologically, it would have been harder for the reader to make connections at the end. It would just seem like a story about a weird woman with a purpose to creep out. But the beginning flashback starts the mystery, like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Everyone that reads the books knows in the beginning that people died, but Capote was more interested in why they died and the events and actions that led up to it. The same applies with A Rose for Emily. We know that she dies at the beginning, but the important part is why she died, what led up to her death, and the psychological processes that made that happen. Having the narrator tell us upfront about her death leads us to think about those questions rather than to keep us wondering if she was ever going to die.

Not having a chronological order also explained the gray hair reference. If the narrator was writing in present tense, why would he/she include the fact that Miss Emily’s hair “was turning gray?” (31). Or that “during the next few years, it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray?” (31). If this was written in present tense, it would seem obvious that as Miss Emily got older, that her hair would turn gray. But because the narrator is reflecting on the past, he/she adds that extra detail in to allow the readers to make the connection in the end at the climax of the story.
William Faulkner’s decision of the point of view was very effective. Mainly, he accomplished a change of purpose. This story shows how something as basic as point of view can change something as complex as an author’s purpose.

The Smell of Autumn

2 September 2008

Somewhere in the last week of summer vacation, something changes. I only notice this change twice a year, in early March and in early September. I can’t feel it, or see it, or sense it, or hear it. Yep, I smell it. Or, I guess you could call it a feeling in your nose, however you like it. The air changes. But I don’t smell pollen. In March, it is still cold, as it is still winter. But it smells warm. And in early September, it is still hot, but it smells cold.

So I’m outside on one of these late summer nights. I try to smell it. And I do. But I try to really smell it, but it doesn’t work. I inhale more and more air, but like Proust, the more I do that, the more it leaves me. I smell it only in a natural breath. Anything forced is just normal summer air, and it loses the change. But in a normal breath of fresh air, it’s almost as if the air going through my nostrils come in cylinders. On the outside of the cylinder is the normal summer air. But in the center is a thin amount of the change. It never really reaches my nostril, but I can smell that it’s there. That’s why when I breathe in more air, nothing changes. But every September morning, and every September evening I’m in fresh air, a movie plays in my head. It’s about, umm, 2 seconds. A train flashing by on a mountain, and me throwing leaves in the air. That’s it. Two seconds.

When I was younger, my mother brought me to New Hampshire. And in New Hampshire, we went on a fall scenic view train. And that was the best nature experience for me. I never had so much fun and appreciated it so much. And I got to wear a turtleneck, since it was autumn. I love being warm in a cold environment. In the summer, I sleep under a warm blanket with the air conditioner on. So I love being able to wear a long turtleneck in the nice crisp weather of the fall. Also when I was younger, my father brought me to a park in Jamaica Plain. There were leaves everywhere! We gathered a pile, and oh yes, I jumped in them. And then I remember just picking up some leaves and making it rain; a happy smile still visible through the leaves at the end of my put-together memory.