A DREAM OF JUSTICE: POEMS BY LANGSTON HUGHES (p. 917)
LANGSTON HUGHES
Open Letter to the South (p. 917)
Because Langston Hughes draws heavily from debates within and beyond the African
American community spurred by the Atlanta Exposition Address given by Booker T.
Washington in 1895, an essential step toward understanding “Open Letter to the
South” is to access some of this historical background. When Hughes speaks of “lies of
color” or “lines of color,” he uses words his audience in the 1930s would clearly under-
stand. Class issues were foremost in the minds of activists at that time—a period of eco-
nomic depression, strikes, picket lines, and violence against miners, mill hands, and
others attempting to organize as workers—and “Negroes” faced not only those issues,
but even greater ones as they sought not so much equality as the means merely to sur-
vive. When Hughes refers to “lies of color,” he may be expressing his frustration that
class issues were debated without sufficient attention to the fact that workers were cate-
gues that the cooperative hand should become a fist that “can united rise / [t]o smash
the old dead dogmas of the past.” Hughes wants his readers to “forget what Booker T.
said,” because workers need to unite rather than to remain separate if they are to
achieve their goals. Rather than seeing the white worker as competitor, Hughes speaks
to white workers as “brother” and “sister” and urges them to take his hand. Hughes may
Hughes’s hopes in 1932 that class solidarity can overcome the barriers of race. But
that decade must have been very dispiriting for him, for his message kept failing to get
through; the shining promises of Communism seemed less likely to come into focus
without complications. Only after the midcentury civil rights movement, Supreme
Court decisions, and federal legislation began to produce results would it become the
norm to see black and white workers banding together—and many people testify to the
continued presence of racial prejudice in the workplace.
LANGSTON HUGHES
Theme for English B (p. 920)
“Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes raises issues about the writer of a poem
(the poet) as opposed to the persona of a poem (the speaker) who may or may not rep-
resent the poet at the time of the writing. Students tend to see all poetry as confession-
al, the outpouring of a soul in the throes of emotion. In fact, those who write poetry
often do so to express themselves. But Langston Hughes, especially at the time this
poem with its twenty-two-year-old narrator was published in 1949, was deeply involved
in experimentation with different voices in both his poetry and his prose. Hughes was
then in his late forties and was a well-known and much-celebrated writer who had
chosen to live in Harlem. His satirically comic figure Jess B. Semple was articulating
the issues within the Negro community of the 1940s and 1950s in a balanced voice
that ranged from pain to hilarity but was never beaten or shrill. Hughes had long been
of 1927. By the time he wrote this poem, he had also been to Spain during the Span-
ish Civil War and to Russia during the socialist fervor of the early 1930s.
Having pointed out the differences between Hughes and his narrator, however,
we may find many similarities between the narrator of “Theme for English B” and the
Langston Hughes who arrived by steamer in New York in 1921 to study mining at
Columbia University. Columbia is “on the hill above Harlem,” as is the college of the
poem. The talented, light-skinned Hughes was not the only Negro on campus, but he
lived in an otherwise all-white dormitory after initially staying at the Harlem YMCA.
He soon was spending all his time with the writers and artists of Harlem; however,
meeting W. E. B. Du Bois and other stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and became an
important participant in this heady intellectual and artistic community. To the fury of
his father, who saw education only as a way to make money and who had no respect
for poets or for his own African American roots, Hughes left school and became a
writer who celebrated his race.
From the distance of adulthood, Hughes has his narrator encounter a typical
assignment for a college freshman, the autobiographical narrative. When a similar
assignment was given a few years ago in a graduate seminar, at least two students
rebelled and wrote essays that resisted the reductive nature of the assignment. Yet their
resistance created what may have been the most revealing responses. One woman
wrote a poetic piece that touched on the shifting nature of identity, and another wrote
Even today, to be white in America is probably to be “more free,” especially
when the white person is the person in authority, as in a college classroom. In
mainstream American culture, white people are the default human beings: everyone
else is defined in contrast to this definition of “normal” humanity; people of color are
different, are other. Of mixed race, Hughes saw himself in the “tragic mulatto”
category, not quite accepted as black or white. When the young Langston Hughes
traveled to Africa, the black people who lived there would not accept him as being like
themselves. They looked at his golden skin and softly curling hair and laughed,
“You . . .white man.” America still struggles with the artificial divisions that the history
of slavery creates between human beings.
frames the lively rhetoric in the middle that sometimes addresses Harlem, sometimes
moves into a jazzy alliteration—as in the “Bessie, bop, or Bach” of line 24—and even
occasionally rhymes as if by accident. Hughes often reworked material that was written
in earlier years, and he may indeed have turned in a response to an assignment much
like this one. We hope that the teacher likes the narrator’s impertinence; good writers
can get away with challenging the rules. But in 1921 or 1949, and perhaps even today,
for college students who are not Langston Hughes, drawing outside the lines entails
risk.
When Hughes uses the word American in line 33, readers who have read the
other poems in this cluster will realize that the term is loaded. Langston Hughes insists
throughout his poetry that America is for people of all races, and he seizes this identity
at every opportunity. It is American to be part white and part black, as indeed Hughes
is genetically, but speaking culturally, the poet demands that we realize the
contribution of both races to our national identity. After more than sixty years, we may
The emphasis on “freedom” in this poem is less directly the subject than in the
previous two poems in this cluster. Nevertheless, the speaker of the poem feels
compelled to remind the white teacher that he or she is “somewhat more free”—in
1949, undoubtedly an understatement. Gaps still exist in the early twenty-first century,
as statistics show, but few people would argue that the degree of freedom has not
improved in the past sixty years. The reasons for the disparities, however, are perhaps
less clear than they were in the years of institutionalized racism and therefore may be
more difficult to analyze and to overcome.
In the poems so far in this cluster, we have observed Hughes seeking to persuade
with both poetic language and straightforward rhetoric. Here he seems to take a “come
let us reason together” approach, making his points gently. Perhaps because of the
power differential between teacher and student, the speaker of “Theme for English B”
does not speak of “man to man” equality as does the speaker in “Open Letter to the
LANGSTON HUGHES
Harlem (p. 922)
When Lorraine Hansberry wrote a play about an African American family in 1950s
Chicago seeking the American Dream, she took the inspiration for her title from the
first line of Langston Hughes’s short poem “Harlem”—often called by a phrase from
its first line, “a dream deferred.” In the first of a series of questions in the poem,
Hughes’s speaker asks about a dream constantly blocked by forces outside one’s con-
trol, “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” By asking questions rather than preach-
We might ask students to define the American Dream. For most people, it
involves at least enough economic security to take care of the basic needs of oneself
and one’s family. For some, it means having an expensive car or living in a gated
community. We have been taught a philosophy of rugged individualism, with each
person expecting to achieve some degree of success and at least to “live up to his or
her potential.” The cliché is that any child in America can grow up to be president.
And we all expect to live in towns where, to echo Garrison Keillor, “all the women are
strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” The
irony of this statement, and its humor, derives from the fact that, of course, for an
average to exist, someone has to fall below the mean. The same capitalistic philosophy
that turns everything into a commodity, judging each person by the quantity and value
of the products he or she consumes, implies that any person who simply works hard
Hughes’s metaphors imply different reactions to such frustrations. Some people
lose their spirit, becoming dried-up shells rather than vibrant human beings. Others
become part of the sickness in society, their misery infecting the whole body of the
nation. Others might frantically try to “run”—escaping into drugs or other ways of
numbing the pain. Perhaps those who find alternative ways of succeeding—the ones
who actually become criminals, beggars, or others offensive to respectable people—
“stink like rotten meat” in the nostrils of America. People who protect themselves by
submitting to their inferior status, playing “Stepin Fetchit” to those in power or
following Washington’s advice to accommodate and assimilate, may be compared to
“a syrupy sweet.” Others give up under the burdens. But the question at the end
perhaps struck the most fear in white readers. Those who are kept down are a constant
threat because some inevitably must rise up. Hughes is writing before the explosive
urban riots of the 1960s, though racial conflict had certainly occurred before this.
Historically minded readers may recall the slave uprisings that panicked plantation
owners throughout earlier centuries. Hughes’s final line reminds readers that one
consequence of oppression is revolution.
LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: HOW JUST IS CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT? (p. 924)
SHERMAN ALEXIE
Capital Punishment (p. 924)
Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, likes to challenge stereotypes and
genres: He is first a poet, but his poetry edges into narrative and prose poetry, whereas
his short stories—some of the “sudden fiction,” short-short-story genre—have the feel
of poetry. He has been called “a storyteller with a poetic streak.” Alexie says that his
poems are essentially stories, and he acknowledges a “strong, narrative drive” in all of
his work. In the introduction to his screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals, published
in paperback by Hyperion in 1998, Alexie talks about genre:
When people ask me, and they do ask me, how I feel about making the difficult
transition from writing novels to writing screenplays, I am not always sure what to say.
I mean, screenplays are more like poetry than like fiction. Screenplays rely on
imagery to carry the narrative, rather than the other way around. And screenplays have
form. Like sonnets, actually. Just as there are expectations of form, meter, and rhyme
in a sonnet, there are the same kinds of expectations for screenplays.
Of course, free verse poetry subverts all expectations of formalist poetry.
So, I wonder aloud, who is writing free verse screenplays? (x)
Americans.
Like his poetry, Alexie’s movie challenges stereotypes of American Indians as
necessarily shamans or warriors, and his texts exist in the present rather than a
romantic Dances with Wolves past. His characters are not magical holy men and
women who turn into deer or possess supernatural spirituality. Alcohol and poverty
play a part in their lives because these are realities of reservation life, but his characters
are not pathetic victims who say, as Dustin Hoffman’s character does in Little Big
Man, “Today is a good day to die.” Alexie says that there is no such thing as a good day
to die, and he parodies the line: “Today is a good day to play basketball” or “Today is a
good day to have breakfast,” his characters quip. Humor and irony energize all of
Alexie’s work.
His work also takes an argumentative rhetorical stance. This is an angry poet, and
he has a right to be. The first peoples of the Americas have endured a holocaust, and
Alexie and other Native American writers represented in this anthology do not intend
to let anyone forget this fact. Consider the texts, biographical headnotes, and
story of “a black man”—reiterating the inequality—who was executed twice because
the chair malfunctioned. Readers may recall true horror stories of the flames, smoke,
and other physical atrocities Alexie describes in the lines following line 74. The speaker
eats from the plate of the man to be executed and hopes to be with him in his death.
He develops this idea further in the last three stanzas of the poem to imply that “any of
us”—the speaker and the reader united in the first-person plural pronoun but alone in
the unique any—could be connected with the executed man, that we have all “sinned”
and all are equally vulnerable to death. The arbitrary connotations of being struck by
lightning add to his argument against the unjust selection of those to be executed.
One of Alexie’s most compelling points revolves around the definition of the word
kill. Proponents of the death penalty when challenged with the biblical
commandment “Thou shalt not kill” contend that the Hebrew word should have been
translated “murder,” referring to guidelines in the Bible for carrying out capital
punishments. The term capital punishment is itself a euphemism, as is execution.
Alexie describes the procedures linguists use to edit dictionaries, a process students
may not realize is based on studies of how words are actually being used in social and
written contexts rather than on prescriptions for proper speech. In line 82, the poet
repeats the word kill, refusing to gloss over the reality of what is taking place. We may
try to sugarcoat it, but killing is killing.
Alexie refers to the divisiveness of the issues surrounding victimization and
punishment with the observation that “we throw the killers in one grave / and victims
in another. We form sides / and have two separate feasts.” In most traditions, funerals
are accompanied by eating. Readers may recall Hamlet’s ironic observation that it was
thrifty of his uncle to make the funeral feast do double duty as a wedding reception.
Alexie is equally ironic in making his speaker a cook who prepares the last meal for the
execution victim. He imagines a vestige of his own being reaching the body of the man
as he is dying, a sort of communion.
Just as he demands an honest definition of the word kill, the speaker questions
the meaning of the word witness. Alexie has a political agenda; he may in fact have
more legitimacy because he is a person of color who realizes the part prejudice plays
in deciding who goes to the electric chair. The speaker’s first claim that he is not a
witness simply seems to differentiate the role of official witness to an execution from
the role of cook. But he moves soon after this first denial into an assertion about the
racial inequality of execution and tells us that this can be proven by the facts—hard
rhetorical evidence that we can verify. We remember that a witness may be someone
called on to testify, to offer proof. In line 22, the denial that he is a witness becomes a
refrain, a line that will echo throughout the poem. This time, the context indicates
that he will not stand as a witness against a man who loves another man, that he does
not pass judgment. The next negation of his witness status comes after he has told “a
story” about a failure of the electric chair and the subsequent double execution of a
man. This is hearsay evidence and is anecdotal, so we would not be expected to give
Race is undeniably a factor in the dealing out of punishments in the United
States. Some readers will find that Alexie’s ethnicity lends authority to his argument,
whereas others may feel that he has an ax to grind and that his ethos is therefore
undermined by his lack of objectivity. Some readers see Alexie’s argument against
inconsistency as more persuasive than his argument against capital punishment per se.
Whereas the movie Dead Man Walking juxtaposes the faces of the victims with that of
the executed man as he dies, Alexie’s speaker imagines himself as present through the
sharing of food. This is a story not about the victim or the crime but about the
execution and the nature of witnessing. The victim in Alexie’s poem is mentioned
matter-of-factly, in spite of the violence of the image describing his death, and the
speaker follows quickly with a joke about the stereotype of Indians gambling. The
humor works on multiple levels, since casinos are one of the few sources of economic
power that tribal governments have, but gambling can be a seductive addiction, like
alcohol.
Alexie assumes readers who critically question what they are told. We want
convincing evidence, so he offers it. But he also trusts his readers to think for
themselves as they consider the images projected, to come to as reasonable
conclusions from the implicit messages as we would from more overt polemics. Like
the word witness, the word tribal has divergent connotations. For the first peoples of
the American continent, identification with a tribe is both legally and culturally
important. Different tribes require different degrees of genetic inheritance for full
tribal membership and the benefits that now accrue from belonging to a separate
nation within the nation of the United States.
Such identification has had its drawbacks in the past, to say the least. Writers
wishing to describe ethnicity constantly rephrase to keep from saying Native American
yet again, knowing that editors will probably cut out references to American Indians.
But some people within these ethnic groups object to the pretentiousness of the term
Native American; one Internet Web site of the Choctaw Nation, for example,
proclaims, “No Native Americans here, just Indians!” Using tribal names seems more
precise, but this doesn’t help when a person is qualified by ancestry to register as a
member of more than one tribe. Nevertheless, the word tribal in this sense has an
objective connotation, serving simply as a descriptor.
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
GEORGE WILL, Capital Punishment’s Slow Death (p. 929)
ROBERT BLECKER, With Death Penalty, Let Punishment Truly Fit the Crime
(p. 931)
CHARLES J. OGLETREE JR., Condemned to Die Because He’s Black (p. 933)
In “Capital Punishment’s Slow Death,” political commentator George Will offers a
conservative case against capital punishment. While he refrains from offering a person-
al perspective on the issue, except to note that few will believe an injustice has been
done if the Boston Marathon bomber is put to death someday, Will demonstrates that
the idea of “moral proportionality” comes with “disproportionate social costs.” By
Will further explains that one of the difficulties in providing effective executions is
the availability of the appropriate drugs. The Supreme Court has been concerned
about the role of social movements that seek to abolish the death penalty, especially as
some groups have successfully lobbied pharmaceutical companies to stop providing the
most effective and painless drugs. But Will is unconvinced that judicial reasoning
should take those agitators into account. Instead, he offers three clear points in the con-
servative case against capital punishment: First, we are not infallible. Second, because
there is no way to undo capital punishment, it must be administered with “extraordi-
nary competence.” But Will doesn’t see the government as capable of such compe-
tence. Third, capital punishment cannot be used as a deterrent because it is applied too
sporadically and occurs out of the public eye.
Will doesn’t feel that pure revulsion is a strong enough argument against the death
penalty, but he does reference Camus on society’s changing standards of decency as a
potential reason. While some might argue that evolving standards of decency should
The question around lethal injection is central to Blecker’s essay, and he argues
that using lethal injection puts the act of purposefully killing a human being within a
problematic medical framework. He is not at all opposed to the possibility of con-
demned prisoners experiencing pain, but he detests the sight of gurneys and IVs and
bodies wrapped in sheets. Instead, he maintains, we should use firing squads to execute
extreme criminals. Doing so, he claims, would prevent “avoidance of responsibility for
punishment.” Others might argue, however, that this “avoidance of responsibility” both
infuses some nuance into the process of condemning people to death and acknowledg-
es most humans’ natural reluctance to kill others.
Blecker is especially interested in restoring what he calls “a moral balance” and
maintains that the death penalty or other retributivist punishments would help if not
correct wrongs, or at least make them easier to live with. While he seems relatively de-
tached, emotionally, he does explicitly list several violent and disturbing crimes, creat-
ing feelings of disgust or fear in readers (pathos). Readers might notice, however, that
he includes no research to support his claims, which potentially hurts his credibility
and hints at an undercurrent of emotion over logic. Is it truly possible to create a moral
balance? What would it look like? Would we only consider violent crimes, such as the
ones Blecker mentions, or would “white collar” crimes that cause extreme financial
hardship, for example, also count?
DISCOVERING INJUSTICE: STORIES (p. 937)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Young Goodman Brown (p. 937)
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” invariably raises issues of historical
and biographical context and intertextual relationships with other treatments of the
Puritan struggle against perceived manifestations of sin and evil. Students may have
read Hawthorne’s frequently anthologized story in high school and perhaps have read
his novel The Scarlet Letter, itself a famous text dealing with the issue of outsiders.
Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible, a retelling of the Salem witch trials, also appears
on high-school reading lists. Less familiar, but recommended to students interested in
an alternate fictional view, is I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by the Caribbean writer
Maryse Condé. This novel tells the story of the Salem witch trials from the perspective
of the Barbadian cook whose stories and Afro-Caribbean lore may have interacted with
Puritan credulity about evil to fascinate a group of young girls into hysteria. Colorful
Hawthorne uses these ideas and others about witches in “Young Goodman
Brown.” Writing in the 1830s, long after the 1692 trials, Hawthorne knew the history
well, since his family had been intimately involved with the prosecutions. In the
generation preceding the witch trials, Hawthorne’s ancestor had become known for
fighting heresy, forcing a Quaker woman to be whipped out of town. Students can
read about this in Hawthorne’s autobiographical preface to The Scarlet Letter called
“The Custom-House” or in various biographies and critical studies of the author’s life
and work. As James Joyce would later do with Dublin, Hawthorne found himself
inextricably bound to writing about Salem, even though he was happiest elsewhere.
Hawthorne takes his witch lore from both oral and written sources, including official
Puritan doctrine such as Mather’s. Mather mentions the “multitude and quality” of
the accused and speaks of a woman “who had received the devil’s promise to be queen
of hell,” words Hawthorne uses in his story. Names of his characters come from actual
people who were brought to trial; for example, Goody Cloyse and Goody Cory both
appear in the historical record. Hawthorne’s ancestor John Hathorne interrogated
Goody Cory. The recipe for witch ointment was published—one hopes as a joke—in
a popular magazine Hawthorne was connected with, but it is interesting that brave
souls who have tested a mixture of smallage (hemlock) and wolfsbane (aconite) say
that it produces a sensation of flying. The inclusion of the “fat of a new-born babe”
perpetuates a common belief about witches as baby killers, a story still heard today.
There are also hints that Young Goodman Brown has made an agreement with the
devil before the story begins, another motif that we recognize from multiple
adaptations of the Faust legend and other sources.
In allegory, abstract ideas are represented as people, objects, places, and so forth
that play symbolic roles. Hawthorne read John Bunyan’s early Puritan allegory
Pilgrim’s Progress many times, and he also enjoyed the long allegorical poem The
Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. He employs the genre in a less ambitious way
than the writers of these classics of English literature, but Hawthorne’s narrative does
have many qualities of allegory. Names are most obviously symbolic. The narrator
wife’s name is equally symbolic. In fact, readers may find that the double meaning as
he cries “My Faith is gone” lays it on a bit too thick. He ultimately finds a vision of evil
that causes his alienation from all goodness and joy, and the report of his funeral
indicates that he goes on to eternal damnation.
Our interpretation of his discovery depends on our answer to the narrator’s
question: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild
dream of a witch-meeting?” The reaction of his wife and neighbors as he returns to
town after his night out gives no indication that they saw him or were engaged in
secret ceremonies. If we recall Cotton Mather’s warning about accepting “spectral
evidence,” we have further evidence for believing that Young Goodman Brown did
not actually see his neighbors. He may have dreamed it, but it is equally possible that
evil spirits fooled him, disguised as his wife and fellow church members. Whatever
happened, the protagonist makes a case against the townspeople, holding them to a
higher standard than he demands of himself. He feels betrayed, but he was willing to
sin, in spite of all his wavering.
Later, Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s unresolved crisis of faith that
Melville had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but . . . will never rest
until he gets hold of a definite belief. . . . He can neither believe, nor be comfortable
in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”
Puritans agonized over whether they were truly of the elect. One record tells of a
woman who threw her baby into a well, explaining that now she knew without a doubt
that she would go to hell, and the misery of doubt about her salvation was over.
Goodman Brown wants it both ways: to have Faith, both the wife and the abstract
quality of character, but also to have the adventure of sin. The anticipation of those
traveling to the meeting in the woods hints that they may expect experiences of a
sexual nature, since women are excited about the new young man they have heard
TONI CADE BAMBARA
The Lesson (p. 948)
Like her young protagonist in “The Lesson,” Toni Cade Bambara remembers a child-
hood in which strong female figures educated younger women and girls. In her book
of essays, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Bambara quotes one mentor, Miss
Dorothy: “Colored gal on planet earth . . . know everything there is to know, anything
she/we don’t know is by definition the unknown.” The older woman teaches the child
how to tell stories based on her inner knowledge, and Bambara says that she “taught
me critical theory.” Later, Bambara would recognize the older woman’s advice in her
reading. She was taught that stories must be culturespecific, that to speak is to assume
responsibility. She learned that her stories must be based in the narratives of freedom
that make up the oral and literary history of African Americans. Her goal is to “lift up a
few useable truths” in a “racist, hardheaded, heedless society.” Her voice is thus both
political and personal, and she takes seriously the responsibility to pass on what she
knows. In “The Lesson,” the narrator learns, but the reader is taught as well.
Because the voice of the story moves into present tense in the second paragraph
and speaks much as a young girl would speak, the age of the narrator matters little.
She has enough distance to choose her details so that we see her begin to realize what
Miss Moore wants her to learn from the trip to the toy store, and we see her at the end
Traditions that worked for survival and freedom in desperate times continue
because children need role models and people who will prod them to think. For many
students, Miss Moore’s efforts make her seem like a busybody who interferes in family
matters. Bambara, whose experience included many such women, would disagree.
She and other members of the black power and black arts movements of the 1970s
believed strongly that neighborhood programs must be established to teach children
about their heritage and about wrongs that need redressing. Miss Moore has a political
agenda, to show the children the inequality that will make them angry. Students may
suggest that simply pointing out the problem does not guide the children into finding
solutions and does not really empower them. Miss Moore’s audience rejects much of
what she says because they see no means of acquiring desks for their rooms or
HA JIN
Saboteur (p. 954)
Ha Jin’s short story “Saboteur” chronicles Mr. Chiu’s false imprisonment and
subsequent release by Chinese authorities. While Mr. Chiu is accused of being a
saboteur and riling up crowds at Muji Train Station, it is clear from how the story
unfolds that he is innocent of any real crime. He is an academic by training and
clearly unused to imprisonment or ill treatment. In fact, he has been on his
honeymoon. He comes across as a little naïve, but since he is ultimately set free and
SECRET CRIMES: STORIES (p. 964)
EDGAR ALLEN POE
The Tell-Tale Heart (p. 964)
‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’’ one of Edgar Allen Poe’s most well-known short stories,
describes the narrator’s decision to kill the old man for whom he is caretaker. The
narrator describes himself as potentially mad but then proceeds to show how the
decisions he makes are far too careful to be made by a madman. His disease, he
explains, has actually made him sharper, more careful, more alert. He seems invested
in communicating to the reader his own well-developed sense of reason. What the
narrator finds most disturbing is the old man’s blind eye, which he is sure watches him
like a ‘‘vulture.’’ Indeed, readers will likely ascribe this desire to kill a man for whom
he otherwise has affection to a symptom of whichever disease the narrator suffers from.
Poe spends a great deal of time on the narrator’s observations about the old man, as
ANDRE DUBUS
Killings (p. 969)
By giving his short story about revenge the one-word plural title “Killings,” Andre
Dubus subtly avoids the definite or indefinite article that would particularize one of
the specific killings that occurs in the story. This universalizes the situation he de-
scribes. Any parent or spouse can imagine taking action to avenge a child or to save a
partner from agony. Young people can imagine their own fathers desperately taking
such matters into their own hands. But the title, like the story at its end, does not allow
the interpretation that revenge murder is without cost. The two murders of the story
share equal billing. Dubus implies, as Sherman Alexie does in “Capital Punishment”
(p. 952) with his equation “1 death + 1 death = 2 deaths,” that killing is killing, no mat-
ter what the warrant.
This does not mean that Matt Fowler does not face an ethical dilemma or that he
would act differently given another chance. This is the true conflict of the story. He is
left knowing that his action has cut him off from his family. His wife did not
participate in the act of revenge physically, and she wants to use their lovemaking as a
celebration and communion in vengeance. But for Matt, everything is now literally
anticlimactic. He has also robbed himself of a full relationship with his living
children, because he cannot make them accessories and he knows that they will think,
as he has arranged for outsiders to conclude, that his son’s murderer has run away.
The reader is complicit in the killing, because we go along for the ride and agree with
him that this boy does not seem as worthy of living as Matt’s son, especially because
we are sure he will not be punished severely. Revenge is not sweet but empty, Dubus
tells us with his narrative.
Dubus introduces a collection of short stories with a quotation from Flannery
O’Connor. “The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in
his personality,” O’Connor said, “those qualities which are all he will have to take into