Nathan's Short Story Thoughts

In the story, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon", we have seen two big moments that, on the surface, would be considered generic for the location: the two lovers on a boat in Paris, and the coming to America with "freedom" all around. However, Baldwin uses the race of his narrator to create a deeper meaning behind what are, on the surface, very quintessential moments. The first one of these scenes is a flashback from the narrator's past. He is standing on a bridge in Paris in April with his girlfriend during the sunset, and he calls it the moment he knew that he was in love. The scene sounds much like the quintessential climax in many romance plots. However, the one he loves, Harriet, is white, and he is black. With the setting being presumably around the 1960's, this leads to a lot of tension behind such a couple. This is the reason for the narrator calling this moment the one he knew that he was in love. He was with this white woman, Harriet, and alth...

Salinger has been an author that doesn't like to give us a lot of information. Most of the stories that he writes show the reader something and don't really explain it - he leaves a lot up to interpretation. However, with some of his stories, particularly "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Teddy", the interpretations that he leaves for us are hidden in the text, only to be truly understood upon a closer inspection after the story is over. With these two stories in particular, you almost haven't truly read the story until you've read them twice. With "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", Salinger begins by describing a phone call between Muriel and her mother. Based off of the descriptions given of Muriel throughout the conversation, upon a first read the reader is likely to assume that the mother is overreacting and over-worrying about something, as mothers often do. A lot of what goes on between the two of them, for example the, "funny b...