Donnelly Library’s Pulitzer Prize Challenge reading group has its third meeting on Thursday, October 13. Below are a few questions to think about for the upcoming discussion.
Take a look at the questions and please post your own questions or discussion points for these short stories in the comments below.
Questions
- The Pulitzer Prize for fiction is awarded to a book "preferably dealing with American life." What do Cheever's short stories say about American life? What parts of the American experience do they draw on?
- How reliable are the narrators of Cheever's stories? Do they tell the truth about their situations and the other characters in the stories?
- What do the characters in these short stories want? What is a happy ending in Cheever's stories? What are readers supposed to take away from these stories?
- Why do Cheever's stories set in a particular place and time still resonate in 2016? What is the enduring appeal of stories of the suburbs?
1.They draw on the ups and downs of American life. They draw on the experiences of youth and love, trying to explain something that can't be explained through facts and figures, and the sorrows of addiction to alcohol.
ReplyDelete2. I found that most of the time, most of the characters were conflicted. They usually told the half truth, and avoided telling the complete truth about a situation. Sometimes the characters were unaware of this, and it seemed to simply be the way they remembered circumstances, which wasn't completely accurate, but somewhat accurate.
3. In my view, the stories were meant to make the reader think, have empathy with the characters, and reflect on the situations. I found that the stories never had an explicit conclusion advising the reader, at least that is not what I took from them.
4. I think the stories have something that everyone can relate to. These emotions are timeless: Love, loss, curiosity about the neighbors, regret, sentimentality, and sorrow.
This was such a great discussion, glad I had the opportunity to attend it. The discussion made me appreciate The Stories of John Cheever even more, the writing, the stories, the characters...and as the facilitator shared with us: there is not a lot of intrusion to the characters, the writer acts like a camera. "Stories about ordinary people going through ordinary problems--Cheever wrote Literature that reflected everyday life and that is just as profound as an epic novel". Yes indeed, ordinary upper middle class suburbanites drowning in the Sorrows of Gin. Not so different from the rest of us...
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