LITERATURE AND CURRENT ISSUES: ARE MILLENNIALS
NARCISSISTS? (p. 476)
TONY HOAGLAND
What Narcissism Means to Me (p. 477)
Poet Tony Hoaglund’s “What Narcissism Means to Me” is an almost conversational
foray into American life. The speaker is at a barbeque with friends and even discusses
the qualities of a fine steak. But when Hoaglund writes that “Narcissism is the system /
that means the most to me” (5-6), his narrator is not necessarily exhibiting the qualities
of a narcissist. After all, he’s listening to his friends’ opinions and noticing their
emotional responses. He seems far less concerned with his love for himself than he is
with the love of other people. One of the poem’s characters, Sylvia, calls narcissism a
“heroic achievement in positive thinking,” a comment that comes across as a little
bitter. Her point may be that contemporary society is invested in convincing us that we
aren’t good enough—not smart enough, not attractive enough, not youthful enough,
and so on. This would make any form of self-love a remarkable kind of achievement.
The poem’s narrator recalls a time when he thought he could live without love,
and most read this as a memory about someone else’s love for him. While it might be
tempting to assume that in order to be loved, one must be worthy, practical experience
suggests this is not necessarily the case. How many wives or husbands return to an
ARGUMENTS ON THE ISSUE
BROOKE LEA FOSTER, The Persistent Myth of the Narcissistic Millennial (p. 479)
EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH AND JENNIFER AAKER, Millennial Searchers (p. 482)
COLSON WHITEHEAD, How “You do You” Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic Culture
(p. 485)
STEVE KELLEY AND JEFF PARKER, You Know the Great Thing about Selfies? (p. 489)
Brooke Lea Foster’s “The Persistent Myth of the Narcissistic Millennial” takes to task
researchers and others who are quick to assume that “selfies” and social media mean
that millennials are more narcissistic than their predecessors. “Selfies,” she notes, are
just as much about vanity as anything else, and are not a clear predictor of a
narcissistic personality. Twenge and Kluger are two opponents she critiques for
misrepresenting the difference between millennials and others. The main charges she
levels at Twenge have to do with Twenge’s methodology and her use of the forty-
question Narcissistic Personality Index to measure narcissism. Foster points out the
ambiguity of several of the questions and critiques the validity of the comparison
Twenge wants to make. Foster finds Kluger somewhat persuasive, at least at times, but
she also recognizes in his lament about Generation Me a song similar to what’s been
sung in every generation past. She believes that without more concrete data to back up
the assertions, there is little actual evidence to suggest true narcissism is on the rise.
Colson Whitehead’s “How ‘You Do You’ Perfectly Captures Our Narcissistic
Culture” argues that phrases like “you do you” are tautophrases, like “it is what it is,” that
serve to self-justify and shut down opportunities for reflection or nuance. He implicitly
connects such tautophrases to narcissism by arguing that such phrases empower the
individual, regardless of “how shallow that individual is” (678). One might argue, in
keeping with Whitehead’s point, that a term like “whatever” could count as a
tautophrase, since it suggests an individual’s complete lack of concern for something
outside him- or herself. In some ways “it is what it is” could be read as an avoidance of
the status quo and a rejection of the possibility of enacting change. On the other hand,
one might see it as also an embrace of the inevitable, enabling us to purposefully direct
our energies elsewhere. Toward the end, Whitehead more seriously critiques
tautophrases like “haters gonna hate,” using sarcasm to imply that these phrases reflect a
broader acceptance of people doing terrible things. “Haters gonna hate” essentially
negates the possibility of meaningful critique. Don’t like drone warfare? Haters gonna
hate… “You do you” he sees as similarly destructive, because it allows us to excuse those
actions under the guise of people acting out their natures. Whitehead’s final point about
the scorpion and the frog is that we have the potential to be either—there isn’t one
nature or self that controls our actions. His hope, then, is that we choose our best self,
and preferably the one that doesn’t drown us all in a bout of narcissism.
While a number of texts have begun to push back on conceptions of millennials
as narcissists, this particular comic reflects some of the distance older generations feel
from newer ones, particularly given the breathtakingly-fast advances in technology that
can alienate people from one another. In its reference to narcissism, the comic reflects
the common perspective that selfies are for oneself, not others, and elides a long
history of self-portraiture and the use of visual media to make sense of the world. A
third frame that depicts the young man on a social media site, perhaps staring
hopelessly at a slew of friends and followers who seem even happier than he is, might
ROMANTIC DREAMS: STORIES (p. 507)
JAMES JOYCE
Araby (p. 507)
The influence of James Joyce on writing in the twentieth century cannot be overem-
phasized. He consistently appeared at or near the top of lists of the most important
books of the last century. Speaking of the complex and almost indecipherable Finne-
gans Wake, Joyce wryly boasted that his aim was to “keep the critics busy for three
hundred years.” In Ulysses, another novel that continues to keep critics and college
students occupied, he allowed his characters internal dialogues that had never before
been attempted to such an extent, fragmenting reality into multiple points of view
and writing styles. He also dealt with sex and other bodily functions in ways that
caught the attention of censors, and the first editions of his books had to be smuggled
into the United States. More troubling to many readers, however, especially those in
his native Ireland, were his irreverent criticisms of the Catholic Church and nine-
teenth-century Western morality. However, in the semiautobiographical novel A Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce presented himself as a man seeking a higher
morality, ending with one of the most memorable lines in literature: “I go forth to
Like most of his writings, “Araby” reflects autobiographical events in the author’s
life. We know that he lived for a time on Richmond Street and that a traveling bazaar
named Araby visited Dublin in 1894, when James Joyce was a twelve-year-old boy.
Readers may feel that Joyce takes the naiveté of his youth too seriously, that his
rejection of conventional attitudes toward love and religion is too extreme, especially
when based on an event so insignificant on the surface. Most of us have made
mistakes like this, however, and still blush to remember obscure humiliations that no
one else noticed at the time. Our closest friends would be bewildered by the power
these memories still have over us. Joyce’s epiphanies are based on just such trivialities,
and he might suggest that we examine these experiences for the manifestation of
reality contained within them, that we take off the blinders of false consciousness. The
beginning of this short story describes Richmond Street as “blind,” meaning that it is a
dead end but suggesting an obvious metaphor about the people who live on such
streets. At the end of the story, the boy’s blindness has been overcome, though he is
ironically blinded with tears. He feels anguish but also anger that he has been fooled
by romantic ideas. Beyond the story of a boy who becomes aware of his false illusions,
idealized the Dublin schoolgirl and the sordid carnival to a ridiculous extent, but the
boy does not realize this until the end. In a similar way, the female protagonist of
“Yellow Woman” moves through a romantic dream, failing to shake herself out of it
even as the reader sees the danger and the underlying brutality to which she has
exposed herself. It is less clear that she frees herself from the power of the myth than it
is with Joyce’s character. When she arrives home to the tableau of the older women
preparing Jell-O, she is faced with the most prosaic of images, much as Joyce’s
character is faced with the trivial chatter of the street fair. But the Jell-O, representing
the undermining of traditional culture, can be seen as a contrast to the mythological
world.
JOHN UPDIKE
A & P (p. 512)
If the minutiae of the daily lives of John Updike’s characters seem trivial and their
preoccupations self-absorbed, this may be the fault of the culture rather than the writ-
er. Updike was a prolific recorder of the details of American middle-class existence
since the publication of his first fiction in 1959, and he continued to tell our stories for
half a century more. Readers tend to love Updike or hate him. Students who read “A
& P” sometimes say it’s the best story they have ever read. These are usually nineteen-
year-old young men who work part-time at grocery stores to earn money during their
first year at college. Many students, typically young women, are highly offended by the
suggestion that Sammy is anything but a sexist pig. Critics are similarly divided on a
more sophisticated and ostensibly objective level. Updike, however, is not a trivial
thinker. Interested in philosophy and theology, Updike joins Franz Kafka, Henrik Ib-
sen, and W. H. Auden as an avid reader of the equally prolific Søren Kierkegaard
(1813–1855), the father of existentialism. Seen as the first philosopher of the subjec-
tive individual and an opponent of “the system,” Kierkegaard coined the term “leap of
faith” to describe the sort of daring move into a new consciousness that we see Sammy
make in Updike’s story.
Like many of Updike’s characters, Sammy seems more to stumble and fall his way
into his future rather than to actually leap. Students often think that Sammy has ruined
his chances by a foolish act, using as evidence the final sentence where Sammy realizes
“how hard the world was going to be . . . hereafter.” We might ask them, however, if
coming to such a realization is a bad thing. If Sammy is an incarnation of Updike, as
many of his protagonists are, will he really be better off as a version of the grim
supermarket manager Lengel, unable to perceive beauty or to think independently, or
as the writer and thinker he will become? Remembering Kierkegaard, we can see
Sammy’s angst as a natural reaction to newly found freedom, and freedom can lead in
a positive or a negative direction. That direction is up to Sammy and falls outside the
story, though we should not let that fact stop our speculations about his future.
Although Sammy’s reasons for quitting may be based on romantic illusions, the
result of his quitting leads to his new, more realistic view of life. Underneath, his
quitting may have less to do with the girls than with his reluctance to be one of the
trivial name-brands of the A & P, catalogued with great specificity in the story. The
customers are characterized as sheep, the workers look like conforming chumps, and
the items for sale are as tawdry as the wares of James Joyce’s bazaar in “Araby” or in
John Bunyan’s Vanity Fair in Pilgrim’s Progress. Sammy quits because he pursues, in
his crude way, the romantic ideal of individuality. Has he, like the protagonist of
“Araby,” sought a pure ideal only to realize that the pursuit was vain? Students might
want to consider times they have done the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Although we would like to think that the gains obtained by the social movements of
the 1960s and 1970s have removed stereotypes about class and gender, students will be
quick to tell us that the time frame of the story has less to do with adolescent thought
than we would hope. Women are more likely to notice and to challenge sexism in the
story, but most students agree that Sammy’s attitudes still prevail among the young
people that they know. However, we might want to grant him an ironic chivalry that—
though misplaced—is preferable in Updike’s estimation to the suppression of
individuality. The final paragraph takes Sammy outside of the supermarket, and he is
able to see the kind of life he has escaped—easy, safe, sheeplike, and paralyzing. Perhaps
some students will maintain that, in this case, hard is better.
Comparing the three characters at the end of the stories in this cluster takes us
back to the cluster’s title, “Romantic Dreams.” Each character—Yellow Woman in
Leslie Marmon Silko’s story by the same name, the boy in Joyce’s “Araby,” and
Sammy in John Updike’s “A & P”—acts within a dreamlike world of fantasy, based on
the stories and the assumptions of his or her specific culture. Yellow Woman seems to
LESLIE MARMON SILKO
Yellow Woman (p. 517)
In the montage of texts that make up Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1981 book Storyteller,
from which this story is taken, the writer presents a mixture of autobiographical, fic-
tional, and mythical retellings of the stories of her life as a member of the Laguna
Pueblo tribe of New Mexico. Like many indigenous storytellers, Silko weaves together
past with present, dreamlike legend with the mundane verisimilitude of everyday life.
She has said that, for her native culture, time is not linear but is like an ocean that
surrounds us. The past does not remain past but ebbs and flows into the present. In
“Yellow Woman,” a young wife and mother, living in a Pueblo household that in-
cludes her mother and grandmother, encounters a mysterious stranger. We meet her
in medias res (in the middle of the story) as she awakens on a riverbank in a sensuous
scene with a man who may be a Navajo cattle thief from a neighboring reservation or
may be a ka’tsina, a mountain spirit. She realizes that she too may be a character in
the myth that her dead grandfather used to tell her. She acts out the part of Yellow
Woman, the heroine of a ritualized captivity story. Depending on the point of view we
As in her novels Ceremony and The Almanac of the Dead, Silko retells a myth in
“Yellow Woman” to question the nature of reality and the nature of personal, family,
and tribal identity. Though it throbs with danger, the world of Silva, with its intense
and sometimes bloody images, puts the narrator in touch with something missing in
an inverted world where the younger generation teaches the older how to make Jell-O.
Throughout the story, the woman gives reasons for her actions, but they don’t
really explain the actions they claim to explain. She stops pulling away from him, she
tells us, “because his hand felt cool and the sun was high.” She decides that he must
be a Navajo because he is tall or because he steals. At one point, she assures us that he
has heard her approaching him; she knows this because he speaks to her without
turning. She knows that she cannot be Yellow Woman because they have just met the
day before. She knows she can escape but stays to eat because she “knew it would be a
long walk home.”
even the original Yellow Woman of the Pueblo legend returns to her family eventually
rather than continuing in an eternal state of romantic adventure. Nor does the story
end with her reaping the consequences of sin. The story does not judge the actions of
Yellow Woman as a morality tale might, and rather than “learning her lesson” she will
simply continue her life as she left it. In mainstream culture, people often try to live
out variations on the Cinderella theme that tells every woman she will find her prince
if she is beautiful, patient, and good. Equally powerful is the gothic “beauty and the
beast” romance in which the tormented hero is converted into a prince by the
insightful heroine who comes to understand him. Advertisements create their own
mini-stories in which romantic fulfillment is achieved by buying the right product or
looking the right way.
IS THIS LOVE?: STORIES (p. 526)
WILLIAM FAULKNER
A Rose for Emily (p. 526)
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” depends on a sense of place, of the social world
in which the story’s events occur. An intricate history of family relationships and social
hierarchies structures William Faulkner’s imaginary Mississippi town of Jefferson, the
county seat of Yoknapatawpha County, where most of his fiction has its roots. Any out-
sider, anyone breaking the strict rules of conformity, is suspect here. But belonging to
the right family or having the right connections grants one indulgences, no matter how
Readers questioning Emily’s actions need to consider her earlier denial of her
father’s death and to think about what might cause such dependency. She is desperate
to find a husband in a time and place where women are failures if they do not attract a
man, and Emily has been thwarted by her father’s possessiveness at the age this might
have happened. Emily has inherited or learned a family tendency to hold on past the
time of letting go. Because we see their relationship through the limited vision of the
town, we do not know what Homer’s intentions are, nor do we know how much of the
relationship exists in Emily’s imagination. Our limited point of view also makes it hard
to judge when Emily becomes disturbed. When she loses Homer through rejection
perhaps? Or much earlier, when her father dies? We can imagine cultures that would
RAYMOND CARVER
What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love (p. 533)
Although earlier characterizations of Raymond Carver as a minimalist have been chal-
lenged as a result of his later work in the 1980s, the term still applies to the stories in
the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, including this one,
which gives the book its title. Carver said of these stories that he cut them “to the mar-
row, not just to the bone.” By using a first-person narrator within the story and limiting
our knowledge of other characters to what that narrator experiences, Carver allows his
readers little information from which to make interpretations, leaving many questions
unanswered. Since we have defined an issue in this anthology as a question about
which reasonable people may disagree, we should therefore expect to encounter many
issues in our reading of Carver. When the narrator passes on to us the stories that Mel
tells him, for example, we are limited to just what the narrator hears and observes and