Strout is humanized for us, however, by the details of his room, his obedient
packing, and his respectful attitude as he addresses the older man as “Mr. Fowler” like
one of his son’s high school friends might have done. The audience has been led to
think of Strout as defiant, but here—in the situation of violence described in the
Flannery O’Connor reference—he is touchingly vulnerable. His own killing of Matt
Fowler’s son has been more impulsive, and he has been wronged. Though this does
not excuse his actions, we see a qualitative difference between the murder that
American society would once have condoned as a “crime of passion” and the
calculated execution that the wronged father carries out.
Readers may point out that Strout epitomizes another American attitude of the
past that sees women as chattels legally owned by men. In both murders, men use the
feelings or actions of women as the warrant for their own violent actions. We are back
to the Garden of Eden, with Adam making the excuse that Eve handed him the apple.
The younger man tries to reason with the avenging father as he pleads for his life: “I’ll
do twenty years, Mr. Fowler; at least. I’ll be forty-six years old.” He assumes that his life
will essentially be over by then, but the older man sees this from the perspective of
fifty-five. Twenty years in prison does not seem just punishment for the loss of his son
and the family’s way of life. Earlier, Strout argues that he had reason to kill Matt’s son
Frank, because Frank violated Strout’s marriage and was keeping him from pulling his
family back together. Neither man takes the step of seeing how the other’s family has
been sinned against.
EDWARD J. DELANEY
Clean (p. 983)
We all have our own histories, as Edward J. Delaney’s “Clean” reminds us. We all
have secrets and stories and choices, and we all carry any number of injustices in our
heart. Written in the second person, “you,” Delaney’s short story “Clean” speaks to us
as if we are the protagonist. This is especially provocative, for in the first several para-
graphs, we learn that the protagonist is guilty of murdering his teenage rival in high
school. Several of his friends helped him cover up the murder and bury the victim’s
body, and they’ve kept this secret for decades.
As the story unfolds, however, the weight of this long-ago crime begins to shift.
What was first subject to denial—the protagonist worked to move on with his high
school and college life—ultimately becomes a far heavier weight to bear. Delaney’s
story frames the protagonist as reflecting on the murder over the course of his life, but
his level of guilt doesn’t necessarily seem to change; that is, he doesn’t feel guiltier
over time about having killed another person. Rather, his recollections focus on how
the murder required him to become someone different to adapt to the secret. For
MISFIT JUSTICE:
CRITICAL COMMENTARIES ON A STORY (p. 990)
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (p. 990)
Flannery O’Connor’s texts mix comedy and tragedy in a manner usually termed
“Southern grotesque.” “Why don’t you ever write about any nice people?” a relative
not unlike the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” once asked her. Like
the ghoulish and ridiculous figures perched on medieval cathedrals, O’Connor’s char-
acters lurk on the crumbling rooftops of the Christian religion and in the shifting
shadows of the American South of the mid-twentieth century, both repelling and fas-
cinating us with their odd humanity. Readers who have grown up in the South laugh,
cry, and blush with shame at the perfection of her characters’ obsessions and their
dialogue. We know these people. They are the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and
Each reader will have his or her own opinion of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
and its ambiguous protagonist. In fact, students sometimes differ over whom they
identify as the protagonist. Usually, we think of the grandmother as the main
character. We see most of the story from her point of view, and she is the only
character whose thoughts we overhear. But a few readers argue that The Misfit is the
protagonist, because the whole story belongs to him, beginning with the
foreshadowing of the opening paragraph and ending with his existential
pronouncement about life in the final sentence. Even minor characters ring true in a
Flannery O’Connor narrative. Students will enjoy the connotations of names. Bailey,
for example, may get his name from “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home?”—a
song in the same blues/jazz genre as the one that gives the story its title. (One can
begin discussion with a recording of Billie Holiday singing “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find” and point out its second line: “You always get the other kind.”) The rude son
who supplants the authority of the father has the name of the founder of the Methodist
Church, John Wesley, certainly a dig at the Protestant usurpation of Catholic
authority. The Misfit explicates the meaning of his name. Rather than describing his
outsider status as we expect, his name is a philosophical statement about the misfit
between sin and punishment.
The Misfit engages in rationalization about his violence, but he seems to do this
for his own purposes rather than as an excuse for his actions. He attempts to construct
a logical argument with evidence that convinces him, that his punishment is
warranted. He is frustrated because, although written documentation exists—“They
had the papers on me”—it does not clarify matters for him, and he has no memory of
his original sin. Therefore, his punishment seems out of proportion to him—it does
not fit. Because of this, he makes sure that he signs his work, leaving clear evidence of
his crimes, so that he will know when the claims made about him are valid. When the
psychiatrist tells him that he was really killing his father when he committed his
crime, The Misfit interprets this literally instead of symbolically, refuting the doctor’s
assertion with evidence. He provides specific facts as proof, offering the date, the
diagnosis of his father’s final illness, and the precise location of his grave. This is hard
evidence, he maintains, because “you can go there and see for yourself.” Jesus is a
logical conundrum for The Misfit. He attempts a theological decision based on his
own brand of logic: If Jesus raised the dead, then we must give up everything and
follow him; but if Jesus did not raise the dead, then any “meanness” that gives pleasure
is permitted. But The Misfit is frustrated again by the lack of concrete evidence to
guide his decision about Jesus. An essential step in the chain of logic is missing.
Because he has not observed with his own eyes whether Jesus raised the dead or not,
he finds no pleasure in anything. By raising the issue, if not the dead, Jesus “thown
The end of the story raises issues for critics. Some think that the grandmother
mistakes The Misfit for Bailey because he now wears the shirt that she has last seen
him wear. Her disorientation and her obvious distress about Bailey—she keeps calling
his name—lend credence to this interpretation. Others insist that she feels compassion
for The Misfit, recognizing him as vulnerable, and reaches out to him as a mother.
She has noticed his thin shoulder blades, and she hears the crack in his voice. He
seems to her to be on the verge of crying. Some readers take her statement that he is
Religious orientation, or the absence of it, will also enter into the reading. It has
been seriously argued that the grandmother confuses The Misfit with Jesus at one
point or that she speaks with the authority of God when she claims her killer as her
child. O’Connor abhorred hypocrisy and arrogance. Just before the grandmother dies,
the falseness and self-centered pride that have characterized her throughout the
journey have, by some interpretations, been stripped away. If this is true, The Misfit is
correct when he implies that it has taken this crisis to make her a “good woman.” The
grandmother goes through her whole repertoire of persuasive appeals and finds them
wanting as she tries to save her life, but we don’t see her using any of them to save her
The ending of O’Connor’s story shocks most student readers, especially those who
love their grandmothers. They usually see the other characters as nasty and the
grandmother, whose perspective we have followed throughout the story, as perhaps
foolish but the best of a bad lot. But the shift in tone is what makes the story so
compelling, and it drives home O’Connor’s point that both good men and good
women are hard to find and that those who think they are good are perhaps the ones
in greatest danger of being forever lost. As in most of O’Connor’s fiction, the comedy
sets us up for the shocking truth as the tragedy is revealed. This moves her writing out
of the realm of cute, regional tales of quaint rustics into the world of theology and
capable of being good and that only people who realize their total depravity are
capable of becoming good. Because to God, O’Connor insists, we are all misfits,
creatures who do not fit into the perfection he requires, the sanctimonious hypocrite
and the confused murderer are on an equal footing and are equally eligible for
salvation. An openness to our unredeemable lack of goodness is our only hope of
redemption. Although the grandmother’s eyes may become opened to her lack of
goodness, The Misfit is left in confusion about his own redemption. He may have
completely cut off any chance he has of becoming good, because he insists on relying
on reason rather than on self-renunciation and faith. O’Connor does not resolve all
the issues of fact because she feels that this would change God’s rules: giving The
Misfit—and the reader—all of the facts about life after death would make goodness a
matter of logic rather than of faith. The mystery must remain.
Some students feel that none of O’Connor’s characters has any redeeming
qualities. Less severe judges argue that all are products of their past experiences,
shaped by their families and their cultural assumptions. The Misfit seems at times to
contain some intellectual and spiritual depth, certainly when compared to the
mundane Bailey, his dull wife, and their self-absorbed children, and O’Connor herself
sees him as the character with the greatest spiritual potential, someone destined to
become a “prophet.” The grandmother, with her childlike qualities, may be just as
selfish as her progeny but also may have the innocence to change, given a loving
environment. Readers may point out, however, that goodness for the old woman is tied
up in social hierarchies that are essentially non-Christian. She is able to overcome her
constant evaluations of others at the end of the story when she classes The Misfit as an
innocent child with whom she is connected in a human chain. Although The Misfit
CRITICAL COMMENTARIES
FLANNERY O’CONNOR, From Mystery and Manners (p. 1003)
MARTHA STEPHENS, From The Question of Flannery O’Connor (p. 1004)
STEPHEN BANDY, From “One of My Babies”: The Misfit and the Grandmother
(p. 1008)
JOHN DESMOND, From Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit and the Mystery of Evil
(p. 1011)
Martha Stephens (p. 1004) believes that her interpretation of “A Good Man Is Hard
to Find” is compatible with Flannery O’Connor’s view outlined in the excerpt from
Mystery and Manners included in this cluster. O’Connor emphasizes that the unex-
pected turn that the plot takes is crucial, that every good story contains “some gesture
. . . both totally right and totally unexpected.” This small bit of the action connects
the character and the reader with a “mystery” that is linked with the “grace” of God.
She suggests that her contemporary audiences have problems understanding the story
perhaps because they no longer believe in the existence of evil or in the need to be
saved from it, and we might speculate that half a century later our readers will have
an even larger chasm to leap. O’Connor contends that because people no longer rec-
ognize grace (the undeserved action of God to redeem human beings who cannot
possibly deserve or earn such favor), it takes extreme violence to make her characters
Students often accuse instructors of “overreading” texts, of taking simple stories
and making them say more than could possibly be intended by the author or logically
defended within reasonable parameters. Stephen Bandy suggests that O’Connor does
exactly this as she seeks to explain her interpretation of the story to puzzled readers.
Bandy makes the excellent point that “[t]here is no ‘later on’ in fiction.” When
O’Connor imagines that her Misfit will go on to become a prophet, she therefore
makes new rules for the game, and readers have a right to complain that the story does
not suggest any such thing. Creative writers among the audience will agree that the
writer is often surprised by the direction a story takes and may be in the same position
as other readers as they discover symbolic meanings and recurring motifs. To
participate in an active writers’ workshop is to undergo something like group
psychoanalysis. Critics therefore can legitimately question the writer’s explication of
her own work, especially when the explanation enters territory outside the text. Bandy
critiques O’Connor’s later comments about the grandmother as an interpretation that
weakens the character by making her merely a harmless, sentimental Southern
grandmother; she must be more essentially depraved than a “cranky maiden aunt,” he
contends, for her to equal the evil of The Misfit. He reads her final actions as evil and
Some critics take issue with the story’s climax, raising issues of definition about
the meaning of grace for secular readers and arguing that epiphany is possible in the
human psyche without any link to religion. However, it is difficult to understand
O’Connor’s story outside of its Christian context. John Desmond uses the Greek word
metanoia to describe what happens when the grandmother’s mind suddenly becomes
clear, explicitly linking it to spiritual conversion, similar but perhaps more substantive
than epiphany. The English words repentance and conversion can translate three
Greek words used in the Christian New Testament (originally written in the Koine
Greek of the Roman Empire): epistrophe, which refers to physically turning around
and going in a different direction; metameleia, which can express regret, being sorry,
changing one’s mind emotionally; and (the word Desmond chooses) metanoia, which
means repentance, a change of heart, turning from one’s sins, conversion. The word
metanoia is used in theology, obviously, but it is also used in rhetoric (to describe a
turning, a change of mind in the midst of a speech, an essay, or other text) and in
Jungian psychology (to describe a process of self-healing and reforming of the psyche
that occurs as the result of a crisis or psychotic break). It is interesting to think of the
grandmother as going through metanoia in the Jungian sense. As The Misfit points
Many readers will agree that O’Connor’s narrative is strong enough to hold
together as a great story even when we read against the author’s stated intentions.
Because she includes religious themes in both her story and her interpretations of it, it
is difficult to read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” outside of this context. Most readers
in our college classrooms do not have such a context, however, and may even be
A MENACING STALKER: CULTURAL CONTEXTS
FOR A STORY (p. 1015)
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (p. 1015)
Owing its inspiration to news accounts, a rock song, and the vivid imagination of the
writer, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates evokes
the ambience of the late 1960s, even as it presents issues still of keen interest to young
adults in the twenty-first century. Today, the adult stalker may use the Internet to build
his superficial solidarity with pubescent (or even prepubescent) girls and boys, but
students will recognize the type. The NBC reality television show To Catch a Predator
and sensationalist “news” programs that exploit victims du jour make Oates’s story
seem familiar and less shocking to us than its original audiences might have found it.
The story offers an opportunity to examine primary sources for historical and
cultural context. The March 4, 1966, Life magazine article in which serial killer
Charles Schmid is tagged the “Pied Piper of Tucson” and Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “It’s
revelation of details about the characters add up to a chilling experience beyond the
“true crime story” genre.
Music both inspires “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and plays a
major role in its plot. Popular culture reflects the “commonsense” assumptions of a
society, and listeners are as affected by it as they are by the advertisements they
consciously tune out but subliminally hear. In Oates’s story, popular music has an
almost hypnotic effect and is characterized as “background like music at a church
service,” giving it a quasi-religious connotation. Indeed, music enables Connie to
transcend her less-than-satisfactory home life and occupy a kind of dream world. From
the drive-in restaurant to the radio in her room, music offers Connie a portal into an
alternate reality in which she is the center.
Given Connie’s age and relative inexperience, as well as her largely superficial
interactions with others, readers might discuss the extent to which this is indeed a story
about love. Certainly there are multiple loves at the center: Connie’s love for herself,
her love for her family (particularly apparent toward the end of the story), as well has
her love of music and the bits and pieces that make up her dream world. The story
chronicles her explorations with friends across the boundary from the shopping center
to the drive-in restaurant, crossing figuratively into a more adult realm of sexuality and
CULTURAL CONTEXTS
DON MOSER The Pied Piper of Tucson: He Cruised in a Golden Car, Looking for
Action (p. 1029)
JOYCE CAROL OATES, Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film (p. 1040)
MEGHAN DAUM, Jaycee Dugard and the Feel-Good Imperative (p. 1043)
In 1966, Don Moser published “The Pied Piper of Tucson,” an article about serial
killer Charles Schmid that may have inspired or influenced Joyce Carol Oates’s short
story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Moser’s piece, like Oates’s, is
particularly interested in the settings and environments within which the crimes take
place. For example, Moser pays attention to the economic and social situation in Tuc-
Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, both Schmid and Oates’s fictional character,
Arnold Friend, prey on youth, luring young folks out from the watchful eyes of their
parents. The two figures are positioned in Moser’s and Oates’s pieces as having some
kind of power over teenage girls, similar to the magic call of the Pied Piper. Indeed,
both are even written about in the context of music. But although Oates’s Connie is
reluctant to follow Friend and does so only under threat, Moser describes the teenage
girls Schmid murdered as somewhat less wary—one was even dating him. Schmid is
framed as a more complex figure than Friend. Although Schmid was ultimately
incarcerated for the murders of a number of teenage girls and subsequently died in
prison, it’s not clear from Oates’s ending whether Friend will meet a similar fate. In
Schmid’s real-life case, suspicious parents and his accomplices testified against him,
but Friend is a somewhat more mythical character. Oates’s Connie comes across as
very much alone, and innumerable possibilities remain.
In her 1986 essay “Smooth Talk: Story into Film,” Joyce Carol Oates discusses
both Moser’s article and Joyce Chopra’s film, Smooth Talk, which was based on
Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates’s essay
in 1991. She remained missing until 2009 when her kidnapper, a convicted sex
offender, was caught with two children he had fathered with her and brought before a
parole board. When she accompanied him to the hearing, the mystery of her
disappearance was solved. The kidnappers, husband and wife Philip and Nancy
Garrido, had imprisoned and abused Jaycee for almost 18 years. Dugard, like
Elizabeth Smart who had undergone a similar ordeal, wrote a memoir about surviving
her experience.
Meghan Daum accuses the media of ignoring key issues to create a sensational
‘‘redemption story’’ about both Dugard and Smart: ‘‘Dugard and Smart seem to have
successfully made the transition to survivor, but to turn them into generic symbols of
hope or, worse, to saddle them with the job of being publicly loving, forgiving, and
grateful despite what they endured minimizes their trauma and panders to audiences
by creating a false sense of closure.’’ Daum is infuriated at the entertainment
imperative of corporate media that prompts it to create feel-good stories of redemption
and recovery out of horrifying events, glossing over disturbing details about Dugard’s
Stockholm-Syndrome-like unwillingness to escape when she had a chance and the
fact that local police over the years missed dozens of clues about her plight. According
TRIALS OF MARRIAGE: PLAYS (p. 1046)
SUSAN GLASPELL
Trifles (p. 1046)
Students are likely to find Susan Glaspell’s Trifles an interesting play, especially if they
read it aloud or even stage it. Each of these things is easy to do, given the work’s brevi-
ty. Perhaps some of your students will object to Glaspell’s implication that men and
women differ markedly in their values, ideas, and experiences. Alternatively, some
might argue that gender divisions are much less evident today than they were in the
early twentieth century. If your class does debate gender relations today, try to focus
the discussion on actual events in the news; otherwise, comments may remain on too
general a level to be useful. Perhaps students will think of a recent case or two in
which a woman who murdered a domestic partner gained sympathy from members of
the public.
Fictional analogies may work just as well. For instance, your class may be familiar
with the film Sleeping with the Enemy, in which the character played by Julia Roberts
initially flees her abusive husband and is later forced to destroy him. Students may also
have seen Enough, a Jennifer Lopez film with a similar plot. Understandably, the class
may want to distinguish between physical abuse and psychological abuse, with John
Wright in Trifles evidently being guilty of the latter. But can psychological abuse ever
be comparable to physical abuse? You might raise this issue.
the road from her home. No televisions exist, and there is no indication that the
Wrights have a radio. The only creature whose voice relieves the silence is the canary,
and Mr. Wright has apparently taken this away from his wife as well. Even students
majoring in criminal justice should be able to get the point, though many student
readers do not, arguing that crimes must be punished. The point may be not whether
murder in this case is okay but, instead, that trifles are not as trivial as they may at first
appear and that isolation and confinement can be fatal.
As students compare Susan Glaspell’s Trifles with the earlier play, A Doll House
by Henrik Ibsen, they may be struck by the differences in expectations that social class
imposes on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women. Nora Torvald is expected
to remain her well-to-do husband’s childish plaything, and the lower-class Minnie
Wright is allowed only drudgery and isolation, but both women are equally confined
by societal rules for married women. And both women break the rules in small ways,
LYNN NOTTAGE
POOF! (p. 1057)
Lynn Nottage’s 1993 play POOF! dramatizes the spontaneous combustion of Samuel,
Loureen’s abusive husband, and the subsequent discussion between Loureen and
Florence of what to do next. Because the play is explicitly set in “the present,” the au-
dience can infer both a timeliness and a universality to the plot. Although it becomes
clear in the play that Samuel regularly beat and terrorized Loureen, perhaps even
cheated on her, her status as a “demure housewife” suggests that her role in the mar-
riage has been to support Samuel and his career. Indeed, she may have viewed the
marriage as her only means of support. After Samuel combusts on the kitchen floor,
Loureen’s emotions range from disbelief, to fear, to guilt, to a kind of hysteria, and
finally to hope. It is not until she talks herself around to accepting Samuel’s death that
she can imagine life beyond him. Interestingly, however, the play does not make clear
how Loureen’s freedom from Samuel might affect Florence’s ability to free herself
from Edgar, her own abusive husband. Florence is disappointed early on that Loureen
got rid of Samuel on her own, but throughout, Edgar still influences Florence’s behav-
ior. In the end, the two agree to meet for cards (rather than dinner) to keep Edgar
happy.
POOF! is particularly remarkable for its use of dark humor to deal with such a
traumatic subject; rather than being a play about abuse, it is a play about an
unexpected triumph. Spontaneous combustion, in stark contrast to domestic violence,
is difficult to take seriously, which absolves the audience from having to grieve
Samuel’s loss. Such a contrast is provocative in part because Samuel no longer has a
body with which to physically and emotionally abuse his wife. He has been erased—in
the end, he is actually swept under the rug, a move that eerily echoes the common
RECALLING A VIOLENT CRIME: ESSAYS (p. 1065)
BRUCE SHAPIRO
One Violent Crime (p. 1065)
A victim of a horrific stabbing attack, Bruce Shapiro offers in “One Violent Crime” a
testimony on how victimhood has affected his outlook on crime. In calling the essay a
“testimony,” Shapiro invokes an ethos or authority that relies on insider knowledge
about being a victim. Despite coming across as also an argument essay, his piece nev-
ertheless includes features one might expect in the testimony genre, including a de-
scription of what he saw and experienced in the attack. He provides details about the
setting, the assailant, and the other victims, as well as reflects on how this event con-
tinues to affect him physically and psychologically. Shapiro’s willingness to share his
Shapiro uses his testimony to also critique the government’s policies toward crime
and the media’s representations of criminal activity, relying on personal experience to
construct his authority. He asks, for example, “What do survivors of violent crime
really need?” Readers will no doubt recognize that he is well positioned to answer
such a question. Having spoken, however briefly, to his assailant, Shapiro is also in a
position to address with authority issues of mental health and the importance of social
services. He is particularly critical of the “three-strikes” law and the move for harsher
penalties for criminal offenders. These, he explains, would not have prevented his
attack, whereas the development of sites for social intervention early on might have.
Shapiro is also disgusted by the media’s widespread inaccuracy and misrepresentation
EMILY BERNARD
Scar Tissue (p. 1076)
Written by another survivor of the New Haven stabbing incident, “Scar Tissue” wasn’t
composed and published until 17 years later, in 2012. Emily Bernard’s essay deals not
only with her experience of the violent attack but also her sense of the role of memory.
Even after having recounted the story numerous times, the process of writing it down,
she explains, is different. Her relationship to the events has changed, and new experi-
ences, such as her repeated hospital visits, her scars from surgeries, her relationship to
her children, and so on, now layer over and add texture to her recollection of that
night. One element she seems to recall with perfect clarity is that she laughed at the
absurdity of the situation. But she can’t quite explain why she chose to go back into
the coffee shop, even knowing that something terrible had happened. Whereas
Shapiro’s “One Violent Crime” emphasizes the connectedness of the survivors, Ber-
nard’s seems more solitary. Adrenaline and shock had made it such that she couldn’t
hear anything. Even as she joined another victim on the steps of an apartment build-
ing, she seemed somehow separate in her observations about him. Her psychological
trauma continues, much like Shapiro’s, in that she is easily panicked by people run-
ning and certain sudden movements.
Unlike Shapiro’s essay, “Scar Tissue” is also intertextual. Bernard includes bits
and pieces of police reports and news articles to both contextualize and push back on
how she remembers that night. One news story, for example, describes the scene as a
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY: ACROSS GENRES (p. 1086)
IDA FINK
The Table (p. 1086)
Because Ida Fink’s play The Table is fairly short, you might assign its roles to particular
students and have them read the script aloud in class. Subsequently, you can ask eve-
ryone in class to freewrite about what this oral performance made them especially
aware of. Another way to launch discussion of the play is to list on the board the vari-
ous images and words that students associate with the Holocaust. Often, students who
have learned something about the subject in other classes or from viewing certain
films tend to think primarily of death camps such as Auschwitz. But the play brings up
thermore, given that the witnesses are recalling an event that apparently took place in
Poland, you might call students’ attention to the fact that the Holocaust was in particu-
lar a decimation of Polish Jewry. Approximately three million of the six million Jews
killed were from Poland——roughly 90 percent of its Jewish population.
The tension in this play derives from the witnesses’ efforts to satisfy the prosecutor,
who is badgering them to remember in detail a scene that occurred twenty-five years
before. Fink herself points out that this play ‘‘is a protest against the law which tries
genocide according to the code intended for trivial crimes.’’ The amount of detail
required seems at odds with the level of horror these witnesses have experienced.
Specific moments like the second woman’s reference to the dog or the second man’s
loss of his wife make that difference especially apparent. Nevertheless, make sure that
students realize that this prosecutor is actually on the witnesses’ side. Presumably, he is
preparing them to face the defense team representing one or more of the Nazi officers
they mention. You might even have your students write their own brief scripts
RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA
In a Bamboo Grove (p. 1101)
A series of testimonies—seven in total—comprise Rynjnosuke Akutagawa’s famous “In a
Bamboo Grove.” While the first four testimonies come from individuals a few steps
removed from the crime, the final three characters are quite central: the bandit, the
woman, and the samurai who was killed by an unknown assailant. Readers likely find
this pacing and structure helpful, as it offers context for all three main characters and
their relationships to one another, as well as introduces the bamboo grove where the
killing took place. By making the samurai’s testimony (revealed postmortem through a
medium) the final testimony, Akutagawa emphasizes the significance of “honor” in this
tale. The samurai is not a figure to be pitied—he was not overtaken by a stronger oppo-
nent—and he willingly accepts the need to kill himself rather than live with shame. He
is arguably the most “masculine” figure in the story, given that his weapons, stature, and
fighting skills are described quite generously. Too, if “masculinity” is tied to a particular
code of honor, committing suicide becomes for him the ultimate preservation of that
dignity.
Interestingly, each main character tells a different version of the story, with the
greatest variations to be found in who claims to have killed the samurai (each admits to
it) and the woman’s particular degree of shame. The few facts on which they all agree
include the bandit had raped the woman (the samurai’s wife), the samurai was at one
point tied to a tree, and the woman ultimately fled the scene. Central to the woman’s
story is the shame she experienced at having been raped, especially in front of her inca-
pacitated husband, and her “penitent” confession reveals her strong desire to ease the