in the first paragrap
occasionally (“super” in the first paragraph refers to the superintendent or caretaker of an apartment building).
You might think of the author’s prose style as a projection of her or his voice as a writer, as if you were hearing the story instead of reading it. Voice, as the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood described it, is “a speaking voice, like the singing voice in music, that moves not across a space, across the page, but through time. Surely every written story is, in the final analysis, a score for voice. These little black marks on the page mean nothing without their retrans lation into sound.”
Tone is the way the author conveys his or her unstated attitudes toward the story. Paley’s tone is serious in “Samuel,” despite her use of colloquial lan guage. Irony is another means by which writers tell stories. Irony makes the reader aware of a reality that differs from the reality the characters perceive (dramatic irony) or from the literal meaning of the author’s words (verbal irony). Paley uses verbal irony when she says that the man who pulls the emergency cord “walked in a citizenly way.” Earlier in the story, Samuel pounds his buddy Alfred’s back until the tears come, saying “You a baby, huh?” This is an example of dramatic irony. In only a few minutes Samuel will be crushed between the wheels of the subway car and his life will end while he is still, com paratively, a baby.
The use of symbolism can also be an aspect of a writer’s style. A literary symbol can be anything in a story’s setting, plot, or characterization that sug gests an abstract meaning to the reader in addition to its literal significance. Symbols are more eloquent as specific images-visual ideas-than any para phrase, suggesting infinitely more than they state. They are not always inter preted the same way by all readers. Paley avoids any suggestion of an abstract meaning to her story until its concluding sentence. Then Samuel, for all his foolish high spirits, becomes a symbol for the value of every individual life in its precious uniqueness.
THEME
Theme is a generalization about the meaning of a story. It is more than the subject of the story, which is what the narrative is generally about. While the subject can be expressed in a word or two (“Young Goodman Brown” is about religious fanaticism), the theme requires a phrase or a sentence. The theme of a story is also different from the plot. Whereas the plot of Hawthorne’s story can be summarized by stating what happened in the action (a young Puritan hus band loses his faith in God and humankind after attending a witches’ coven), the theme is an abstract statement of the meaning of the story (losing faith can destroy a person’s life).
The theme of a story abstracts its meaning from the concrete details of its plot, characterization, setting, point of view, and style. Theme is the implied moral significance of all the details of a story. It need not always be stated as a moral judgment. The story’s meaning can and often does suggest principles of right and wrong behavior, but the impulse to tell a story can arise from several universal urges of the human spirit-to communicate, to create, to raise ulti-
Theme 17
