Tied Together by Haunting by Teri Bruno

Tied Together by Haunting, by Teri Bruno

Tied Together by Haunting

Ever since I was young, whenever I cracked open a book or sat in front of the television watching a movie, I always wished for a happy ending. Anxiously, I would sit squeezing my fingers together, hoping the prince would save the princess, the animals would find their way back home, and the hero would conquer the villain. However, happy endings are rarely realistic and hardly convey the true resolutions to life’s messy conflicts. In Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds, the author employs several methods of delivering perspective, while threading a constant theme throughout her stories in order to evoke empathy in the readers without simply supplying a happy ending.

Throughout Groff’s collection, she utilizes several points of view as a tool to emphasize the character’s struggle and give the readers insight into the characters’ emotions. Although second person narration is rare, it is absolutely vital to the story called “Watershed.” Often times, authors may limit their use of this point of view because it is an intimate perspective in which the story tells the reader what to think and feel. Yet this is Groff’s goal in this particular story. Celie, the narrator, recounts the details of her marriage to a specified “you,” who readers discover is her husband. With her profession in the story being a storyteller, it is fitting that Groff chose to use this point of view. As the story continues, Celie reveals that her husband is dead. After Celie starts an argument about how she hates the town and all the people in it, her husband leaves in a rain storm and ends up hydroplaning and crashing his truck into a tree which sticks a branch through his chest. He dies later in the hospital from Hydrocephalus. Groff’s use of the second person point of view turns the reader into the character of the dead husband, which is who Celie is ultimately addressing. She is retelling the tale to him, almost as if by his bedside, hoping he will wake up. Celie asks whether she imagined, “the tightening of your thumb on my palm” (Groff 186). It helps the reader understand Celie’s grief about the loss of her husband and the guilt that she feels. However, when Celie reveals later that “I see you now just leaving rooms I am in,” the reader can see that she is still haunted by the incident (188). By using this perspective, Groff allows the readers to fully grasp the vulnerable and stricken state of Celie, who is intimately recounting their relationship to her dead husband.

In “Watershed,” Groff also uses the theme of water to convey the relationship between the untamed water and the unpredictable situations that occur in someone’s life. Throughout the story, water appears in many of the scenes. “Watershed” starts off with a diver telling a couple a story about how he once went down with a diving buddy, and upon realizing that his partner was falling down into an abyss, the diver saved him because he had never felt a purer love for a human being. Later in the story, however, when the woman is at the funeral for her husband, the diver approaches the woman again and retells the tale. The diver actually doesn’t save the man and just lets him go while he floated in the water suspended alone. In both occurrences, the diver’s story is parallel to the state of the couple. When they were together and in love, the diver saved the man. When the woman was left alone by the tragic death of her husband, the diver too had stood alone. However, as Claire Hopley states in the Washington Post, “his reminders of the people that may never have emerged from its depths are eerie and alarming” (Hopley 1). The revision to the diver’s story is a turning point for Celie. He says that the love was all true, but only after he couldn’t see him anymore, when he was “just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone” (Groff 190). With the loss of her husband, Celie is alone as well, and the diver’s story is tied to hers not only in the deaths due to water, but also in their realization of the love they have for the people they lost. Groff uses water because of its unruly nature, and it parallels the major and unforeseen events that occur in Celie’s life. John Marshall, a book critic who wrote for the Seattle Post, describes Groff’s thematic specialty as “where her perceptive vision is focused - turns out to be turning-point moments, often for women characters - turning-point moments sometimes not recognized as that until it is too late” (Marshall 1).

The theme of water is also threaded throughout the story, tying the piece into the title of “Watershed.” In the small town that the couple lives, it rains constantly. The husband dies because he hydroplaned while driving in his truck and a tree branch smashed through his chest. Ultimately, though, he dies of Hydrocephalus, otherwise known as “water in the brain.” When the woman is driving home during one of her college years, she hears on the radio that an old couple died by jumping into the Niagara Falls together. These themes of water tie into the concluding paragraph and the point of Groff’s story, that “there is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned” (Groff 192). This ending is not necessarily described as a happy one in which the conflict is resolved with a simple solution or the conflict was simply an illusion or a dream. But it is satisfying in the sense that the readers can relate to how Celie has changed and is coping with the unfortunate events that have occurred in her life.

But themes in Lauren Groff’s collection are not just restricted to stories. Throughout the collection, there is the theme of birds that encompasses many of the stories. In “Watershed,” for example, when Celie’s husband says that he wants to build her a house before they get married, he states that “every bird needs her nest” (171). It is this sentence in particular that casts fear and doubt in Celie. As she looks back on this incident as she tells the story, she says that it was her fault she didn’t say what she should have, that she “wasn’t the bird type, or maybe the nest type” (172). It is clear from Celie’s thoughts that she fears being constrained and that she is different from the typical flock of birds. Instead, Celie tends to stray from the flock of birds that is the traditional small town in which she now lives with her new husband.

In the last story of the collection, “Delicate Edible Birds,” point of view plays a particularly important role. Groff uses the third person omniscient perspective, another fairly rare point of view because the author can give the readers access into any characters’ thoughts and feelings. Though the majority of the story is in the perspective of the woman character, Bern, occasionally the story flips into the perspective of one of the four men. Groff puts us in the mind of all the four men at one point or another in the story. She does this for one reason in particular, which is so the readers can understand the various perspectives on the conflict with Bern. The five characters in the story, four men and one woman, are all journalists, with the exception of one who is a photographer. Set during World War II, the group is following news of the war, and their car breaks down just outside of Paris in front of a fascist man’s house, who demands that Bern have sex with him. When Bern refuses to have sex with him, the fascists man holds them hostage but will let everyone go if she complies. At first, all the men seem to understand. However, as the time draws nearer to when the Nazis will possibly come for them, Groff allows us into their minds and we understand why they start to change their perspective on Bern having sex with the man. While at first the men claimed that “nothing of the sort can happen, of course” and that there was “no question...for the principle of the thing” the men all have different reasons for wanting to be free from the threat of the oncoming Nazis (285). Parnell has a family back home in England, and Lucci has a wife who has disappeared, yet he still wants to live in hopes that she is alive. The men slowly start to believe that Bern, who is notorious for sleeping with numbers of men, should “just do it and get it over with” and when all of them turn their backs on her, she complies, crushed and confused as to what has changed their minds (286). Despite this all-knowing perspective, Groff only goes into the minds of others on a need-to-know basis. As Carolyn See states in a piece on point of view, an author should only go into a character’s mind “if they absolutely need to think or feel something…otherwise, let them alone” (See 151). Without the use of this all-knowing perspective, the readers wouldn’t have the insight into the men’s minds to understand their desperation and reasons why they eventually disregard Bern and all quietly agree that she needs to comply.

In “Delicate Edible Birds,” we also see the character of Bern struggle when she is presented with a delicacy of a tiny bird while eating dinner with her lover, the Mayor of Philadelphia, in France. While everyone else veiled their faces with napkins as they ate the birds, Bern wrapped the bird in a napkin and later dropped the carcass from the hotel balcony, “setting it free, she thought, though it dropped like a lead weight to the ground for some prowling beast to eat” (Groff 288). This occurrence is important because it helps the readers later understand why Bern, who is notorious for having affairs and sleeping with lots of men, refuses to have sex with the Fascist man who is keeping them hostage and will let everyone free if she complies. She too wants to be free, and holds to her choice of not having sex with their captive. Yet as the time nears when the Nazis might come and find them, the men start to urge Bern to comply with the man’s wishes. Bern is the bird, trying to set herself free, but who gets dropped to the ground like the lead weight and has sex with the prowling beast.

While first person perspective is very common in stories because it allows the author to step into the role of one character and give the readers intimate details, the point of view in “Lucky Chow Fun” is essential to lead the readers into the mind and thoughts of the main character, a round and unattractive teenage girl named Lollie. The readers can see the small town of Templeton through Lollie's eyes, and this especially important when the town is hit by a huge event, the discovery that the local restaurant called Lucky Chow Fun was a secretive whorehouse. When Lollie was in the parking lot of the restaurant one night before the event, she almost knocked into one of the many Chinese girls who worked there, simply mumbling and stepping away, not really looking at the girl she had almost trampled because “nobody in Templeton cared to figure out who the girls were” (8). Yet Lollie vividly describes the girls, saying the girls were like “ghosts in white uniforms chopping things, frying things, talking quietly to one another” (9). When she hears on the news the next day that one of the girls died, and this lead to the discovery of the whorehouse, Lollie is shocked and we see the impact that the tragedy has not only on her, but on the town. Her mother’s boyfriend had apparently been one of the names on the list to visit Lucky Chow Fun, and numbers of wives discovered their husbands’ unfaithfulness, leading to a scandal in the town and casting the Chinese girls as the enemies. Though Lollie admits that she forgot about the poor Lucky Chow Fun girls, years later she dreams about “the seven ghosts” and imagines the terrible events that they had to endure. It is important that Groff uses Lollie’s perspective in this story, the perspective of a girl the same age as the girls who were discovered to have been taken from their homes in China and placed into a whorehouse. In this way, the first person perspective serves to take the readers on the journey of a coming-of-age event that greatly impacts Lollie.

Birds also serve as an important theme in “Lucky Chow Fun.” Lollie’s younger sister, Pot, collects taxidermied birds that are scattered around her bedroom. However, Lollie avoids her room as much as possible because she had “one particular gyrfalcon perched on her dresser that seemed malicious, if not downright evil, ready to scratch at your jugular if you were to saunter innocently by” (3). Though the birds are an escape for Pot, they serve to parallel the girls who work at the whorehouse. Groff does not use real birds, but instead decides that Pot will have a collection of stuffed birds who sit on shelves, quiet, fake, and dead on the inside. In a similar way, Lollie describes the girls at Lucky Chow Fun as ghosts, yet they more so resemble the birds. The girls were always quiet, only speaking softly to each other, and though they were alive, they weren’t really living. Lollie later describes the girls as “wordless, as always” (39). Lollie’s reaction to the birds mirrors the girls. She tends to avoid them. On the outside, they resembled people, like the taxidermied birds resembled live birds, however on the inside, they too were stuffed and mind as well have been sitting on Pot’s shelf.

Overall, however, the reader wonders why Groff might have chosen birds as a major theme throughout her collection. As Connie Ogle states in the Miami Herald, “the women in Lauren Groff’s debut story collection exist in varying stages of unrest” (Ogle 1). These women are emotionally trapped and are struggling to break free and fly. Groff uses the birds to convey the point that all women go through experiences in which they must learn lessons and try to overcome challenges given to them.

Despite Groff’s varying perspectives on stories and use of themes to help convey her messages, there is one story in particular that weakens her collection. “Fugue” is a story that is very complex and takes time coming together. Groff presents three different sub-stories and then attempts to tie them all together at the end. To the reader, the story stretches out a bit too long, and the readers are in a circle of sub-stories, wondering what the point is. As John Marshall states, “ Groff’s arching ambition for the story results in too many details withheld in hopes of adding mystery, too many characters and their too complex personal stories, too much confusing artifice” (Marshall 1).

Throughout Groff’s collection, she stays away from simply presenting the reader with a happy ending and instead leaves them with endings in which the characters are changed. But this does not mean they are necessarily changed in a good way. In many of the endings, the reader can infer from the various point of views that the characters will still be struggling. In “Watershed,” for example, the last few paragraphs no longer address Celie’s husband but instead focus on her coming to terms with his death. Celie’s husband is still dead, and she must come to the harsh reality that there are things in life that are out of her control. Groff shies away from taking the easy way out in her stories, and prefers to end the stories more realistically. In an ideal world, Bern probably would have held to her morals and not have slept with the Fascist, while Lucky Chow Fun wouldn’t have turned the small town of Templeton into a mass of scandal that broke families apart. However, Groff paints realistic characters by making them not always take the right path, by questioning their morals, and by not coming to a complete realization of who they are. In this way, Groff pulls empathy from her readers, and portrays situations and decisions that people can relate to. Lauren Groff best sums up her idea of happy endings in her first story, “Lucky Chow Fun”:
And it is a happy ending, perhaps, in the way that myths and fairy tales have happy
endings; only if one forgets the bloody, dark middles, the fifty dismembered girls in the
vat, the parents who sent their children into the woods with only a crust of bread. I like to
think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me (Groff 39).

And though our own personal stories and lives have middles that are haunting, they are the very strings that Groff uses to tie our experiences to her stories, giving us reassurance that we are not alone in our challenges.

Works Cited

Groff, Lauren. Delicate Edible Birds. New York: Hyperion, 2009.
Hopley, Claire. "Tales of Tough Women." 22 Feb. 2009. LexisNexis. 10 Nov. 2009 .
Marshall, John. "Short Story Collection's Dazzling Variety Spans Decades and Continents." 02 Feb. 2009. LexisNexis. 10 Nov. 2009 .
Ogle, Connie. "Female Characters Discover Hardships and Joys of Life." 01 Feb. 2009. LexisNexis. 10 Nov. 2009 .
See, Carolyn. Making a Literary Life. New York: Random House, 2002. Print.

Tied Together by Haunting - Assignment

Short Story Collection Analysis Assignment ENC 1142-19

What Works, What Doesn’t and Why

Rationale: As we have discussed in class, reading is just as important to the craft of writing as sitting in front of the computer and typing out a story. Through reading we become savvier to the conventions of fiction and learn about our own aesthetics. It can even be worthwhile to read a bad book now and again, because it helps to further instruct us on how to avoid such mistakes in our own work. Each week I’ve asked you to look at the work of an established author while we continue to work on our own explorations into fiction, and in this assignment I’m asking you to go out and find stories worth contemplation that the rest of us can go seek out in our own time. After you find a book to write on and complete your analysis, please post your paper to Blackboard, thus creating a reading list for your classmates to work their way down in their spare time. Such a tool will prove valuable in your quest to pursue a writing life.

Requirements: For this assignment, you must a short story collection to read and analyze by any author (it could be one we read in class, a new voice or old favorite so long as the particular book you focus on is new to you). In an essay of a minimum of 6 pages (12 pt. font, double-spaced, Times New Roman, 1 inch margins), evaluate the quality of the collection, highlighting the author’s strengths and weaknesses as you see them, analyzing the author’s skill in manipulating the elements of fiction as we’ve identified them this semester. You must be evaluative and support your assertions by using three secondary sources in addition to examples cited from your sources. I am interested in your personal aesthetics here, but they still need to be supported. The secondary sources must be diversified this way: at least one REPUTABLE internet source, a book source and a journal or magazine article. The secondary sources may directly address the stories you are analyzing, or they may address a style or technique in absentee of your chosen work. You need not analyze each story in the collection, but must reference at least three.

Some optional questions to consider when writing your review:

• Is there a theme that runs through the stories? If so, is it overbearing or subtle and how does it contribute to your experience of reading the collection?
• Does the author stick to one point of view and narrative presence or is there a great variety? Does any one story ring as especially true or forced?
• What are the author’s greatest strengths overall and why do you consider them strengths? What about weaknesses?
• What is the best story? The worst? Why have you categorized them that way?
• How would you characterize the author’s writing style? Tone? Language? Does it vary greatly from story to story?
• Is the collection successful overall? Why or why not?

Tied Together by Haunting - Notes

Notes on Delicate Edible Birds

Story #1 Lucky Chow Fun
-Opens with the setting, gives us a typical year for the town, and then sets up that there will be conflict, a break in the town’s rhythm. “We natives stopped looking one another in the eye.”
-Lollie has a great talent, can beat nearly everyone in the butterfly, yet is round and not attractive.
-Love the connection back to the Ambassador’s mansion that is so much a mystery; this is the place where Pot is when they cannot find her. Strange connection-- he is the one giving her the birds and she goes there everyday after school.
-Foreshadowing that I didn’t see coming. Tim came back from where the bathrooms were in Lucky Chow Fun with a “half-excited, half-horrified” look on his face. One of the friends says “Everybody knows...”
-Like that the character realizes her faults and takes responsibility: she leaves Pot at home alone.
-I like the side note stories, of the goddess Nugua and the Grimm’s story of Hansel and Gretel, Fitcher’s Bird, foreshadow the events the occur after.
-Never simply says that the garbage man went to the whorehouse, but we can tell because of several reasons. Mother hasn’t gone to his house by four, and he hasn’t called. Ends up moving away.
-Like how she gave us insight into the history of the Chow Fun girls at the end, and showed the impact it had on Lollie.

Story #2 The Wife of the Dictator
-Point of view is third person, we are unsure exactly who the narrator is. Is it the town of women?
-Early on points on setting and habits of the town; Dictator’s wife is from America; “She is not one of us.”
-Very judgmental narrator(s)
-Description of the characters show not tell; in describing the dictator: “there is something in him that makes other men smaller.”
-Such great detail; the grille of the confessional casts shadows “like lace on her skin.”
-Shows personality through action: Dictator does not simply use a gun to kill the boar but kills it with his bare hands.
-Mystery of painting and return to explain the woman.
-Love the ending--we understand the mystery brought to us in the beginning, why the dictator picked this woman as his wife. He used the power she employed in her paintings, and the women of the town see this at the end as they sail away safely on the ship and leave her to die. “like she is emptied at last.”

Story #3 Watershed
-Interesting point of view; “you, our, we”
-Introduction hooks the reader and pulls us in. We can already tell there is a close, intimate relationship when he touches her knee under the table.
-Good examples of showing not telling. She shows us he was not well off when she says “to me it was another book from the bookstore that I’d half understand; to you, it was a birthday present for your little sister.”
-Humor; “Call me banana.” Her best friend saying “Hallelujah.”
-Imaginative- “storytelling is simple: selecting a few strands from many and weaving them into cloth.”
-“I couldn’t see the truck or hear it pull away, but I felt it.” Something we can all relate to, when you just have a feeling someone has gone away.
-Questions that give information; when author gives us a riddle all in questions, she is really building up the suspense of the information and allowing the readers to guess the inevitable.
-Paragraph on grief- her explanation and definition as of now because of what she has been through.
-Return to the beginning story; new perspective because the diver changes it.
-Theme of water throughout and ties it in at the end. Rain in the town, husband died of “water in brain,” old couple died in falls, diver’s story is in the ocean.

Tied Together by Haunting - Outline

Outline of Delicate Edible Birds Research Paper

Introduction and Thesis
Topics to touch on: 1. Point of View 2. Themes 3. Not simply a happy ending

Topic 1- Point of View
Stories to focus on: Watershed, Blythe, The Wife of the Dictator

Watershed
• second person point of view
• turns reader into character-- helps us better understand how grief/hurt and emotions about husband’s death. Almost as if she is retelling story to dead husband. Looking back.
• pg 172 “Even in that first hot flush I knew you were human flawed.”
• pg 186 “Did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm?”
• pg 188 “I see you now just leaving rooms I am in.”

Blythe
• first person point of view
• journey of Harriet finding herself
• allows us to understand her struggles-- why she stays friends with Blythe for such a long time and why she leaves.
• Starts out with the years before Blythe-- emphasizes how she has changed her.
• pg 111-112 “only when I smelled bourbon on breath...that my heart fell for her.”
• So little like Blythe
• pg 118 “not even Blythe...” hated myself for doubting her.
• we see through her eyes the downfalls of Blythe...like her attempting suicide.
• pg 128 “...both knew it was true.”
• pg 139 breaking point-- she sees Blythe’s seduction
• pg 141 “that need” and pg 142 finally able to see herself

Topic 2- Themes (or recurring situations)

Watershed
• rain in town, husband died of “water in brain” because of the rain and flooding, old couple dies in falls, diver’s story in the ocean
• not a happy ending
• connecting to ending--water ties it all together
• pg 192 “it is dark...and it is clear.” Symbolizes their relationship

Birds Throughout the Book
• watershed (again pg 171 and 172)
• Delicate Edible Birds-- Bern can’t eat the bird delicacy--reveals her character
• Overall, though, why birds? Analogous to characters going through life lessons and challenges--need to learn how to fly again. Varying stages of unrest.

Topic 3- Not Just Happy Endings
• Delicate Edible Birds--ends up having sex with Nazi guy.
• Lucky Chow Fun-- pg 39 “and it is a happy ending...middle that haunts me.”
• Watershed- pg 192 “There is no ending...no neatness in this story.”

Problem in Collection
• Fugue-- takes time coming together; too many details withheld

***Remember to tie in empathy-- she does these things to help us identify with characters and feel their struggles and emotions.***

Tied Together by Haunting - Draft 1

First Draft on Delicate Edible Birds

Ever since I was young, whenever I cracked open a book or sat in front of the television watching a movie, I always wished for a happy ending. Anxiously, I would sit squeezing my fingers together, hoping the prince would save the princess, the animals would find their way back home, and FIND ANOTHER EXAMPLE HERE. However, happy endings are rarely realistic and hardly convey the true resolutions to life’s messy conflicts. In Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds, the author employs various points of view and recurring situations or themese in order to manipulate the reader without simply supplying a happy ending.

Almost every one of the nine stories in Groff’s collection has a different point of view from the others. In Lucky Chow Fun, the story is given in first person. The Wife of the Dictator is narrated by a group of outsiders in first person plural. Watershed is beautifully crafted in second person. This variety of perspectives emphasizes the stories and the characters. Lucky Chow Fun’s narrator is a high school girl named Lollie, who deals with many issues from self-image to her mother. It is important that the readers can grasp her thoughts and understand her perspectives so we can have insight into her character. In The Wife of the Dictator, the narrators are assumingly a group of local women who are describing and judging the dictator’s new wife and her actions. This implies how much of an outsider the wife is to the townspeople; she is not a physical part of their group but is simply a character to watch and critique. Although second person narration is rare, it is absolutely vital to the story called Watershed. Throughout the story, the narrator is not speaking to the reader, but to a “you” who ends up being her husband that we later find out is dead. The story is not necessarily meant to give information to the readers, but is instead part of the grieving process the woman is enduring.

Often in Lauren Groff’s stories, she will have a recurring theme or scene that will give a new perspective on the story. Watershed starts off with a diver telling a couple a story about how he once went down with a diving buddy, and upon realizing that he was falling down into an abyss, the diver went and save him because he had never felt a purer love for a human being. Later in the story, however, when the woman is at the funeral for her husband, the diver approaches the woman again and retells the tale. The diver actually doesn’t save the man and just lets him go while he floated in the water suspended alone. In both occurences, the diver’s story is parallel to the state of the couple. When they were together and in love, the diver saved the man. When the woman was left alone by the tragic death of her husband, the diver too had stood alone. The theme of water was also threaded throughout the story, tying the piece into the title of Watershed. In the small town that the couple lives, it rains constantly. The husband dies because he hydroplaned while driving in his truck and a tree branch smashed through his chest. Ultimately, though, he dies of Hydrocephalus, otherwise known as “water in the brain.” When the woman is driving home during one of her college years, she hears on the radio that an old couple died by jumping into the Niagara Falls together. These themes of water tie into the concluding paragraph and the point of Groff’s story, that “there is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned.”

Tied Together by Haunting - Draft 2

Second Draft on Delicate Edible Birds

Ever since I was young, whenever I cracked open a book or sat in front of the television watching a movie, I always wished for a happy ending. Anxiously, I would sit squeezing my fingers together, hoping the prince would save the princess, the animals would find their way back home, and the hero would conquer the villain. However, happy endings are rarely realistic and hardly convey the true resolutions to life’s messy conflicts. In Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds, the author employs various points of view and recurring situations or themes in order to evoke empathy in the readers without simply supplying a happy ending.

Throughout Groff’s collection, she utilizes several points of view as a tool to emphasize the character’s struggle and give the readers insight into the characters’ emotions. “Blythe” is a story in which Groff uses point of view to help readers sympathize with the characters. Though it is written in first person, which is common, this point of view is significant to the story. The narrator is the character of Harriet, a wife and mother who is struggling to find herself. She begins the story by detailing her life before she meets Blythe, describing them as a “kind of beautiful limbo, sticky with juice boxes” in which her children would watch her carefully, hoping she wouldn’t explode (Groff pg 109). This account of life before Blythe emphasizes how she later changes. When her husband gives her poetry classes as a birthday gift, she befriends the eccentric character of Blythe, a beautiful woman who warns that she has attempted to kill herself three times and is probably crazy. At first, Harriet adores Blythe because of how little alike they were. Over time, however, the readers see Harriet doubt Blythe’s actions and endure a struggle to deal with her selfishness. Blythe’s neglect of her children particularly worries Harriet. When Blythe came to her house one day, Harriet wondered if she left her boys alone, but she tries to reassure herself, stating, “not even Blythe, I hoped, would leave them alone, I thought, and hated myself for doubting her.” The first person point of view allows the readers into her personal thoughts that she doesn’t share with anyone. Through her eyes, the readers see the downfall of Blythe and how she relies on Harriet to keep her standing. Blythe cries and tells Harriet that without her, she would be nothing. Harriet reveals that, “we both knew it was true; only I knew it was bittersweet (Groff pg 128).” These are the emotions that the readers need to know in order to understand why Harriet has an epiphany and suddenly breaks away from Blythe to go to London. After comforting Blythe when she wants a divorce from her husband, Blythe kisses Harriet and gives a seductive little laugh that “spoke of practice of seduction,” and Harriet feels a break in her (Groff pg 139). After returning from London to see Blythe be honored for a work in poetry, Harriet is not able to look or speak to Blythe. Instead, she peers at her through the reflection in the window, seeing the “panic in the eyes whirling up as soon as she saw me, that need (Groff pg 141).” She looks into the window, passed Blythe’s reflection and sees her own face grow large and pale and decides that she will release her because she could do no more. Groff’s use of the first person perspective allows Harriet to take the readers on her journey to self-discovery, and see the struggles she endures in her attempt to get there.

Although second person narration is rare, it is absolutely vital to the story called Watershed. Celie, the narrator, recounts the details of her marriage to a specified “you,” who readers discover is her husband. With her profession in the story being a storyteller, it is fitting that Groff chose to use this point of view. As the story continues, Celie reveals that her husband is dead. After Celie starts an argument about how she hates the town and all the people in it, her husband leaves in a rain storm and ends up hydroplaning and crashing his truck into a tree which sticks a branch through his chest. He dies later in the hospital from Hydrocephalus. Groff’s use of the second person point of view turns the reader into the character of the dead husband, which is who Celie is ultimately addressing. She is retelling the tale to him, almost as if by his bedside, hoping he will wake up. Celie asks, “did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm (Groff pg 186)?” It helps the reader understand Celie’s grief about the loss of her husband and the guilt that she feels. However, when Celie reveals later that “I see you now just leaving rooms I am in,” the reader can see that she is still haunted by the incident (Groff pg 188). By using this perspective, Groff allows the readers to fully grasp the vulnerable and stricken state of Celie, who is intimately recounting their relationship to her dead husband.

In Watershed, Groff also uses the theme of water to convey the relationship between the untamed water and the unpredictable situations that occur in someone’s life. Throughout the story, water appears in many of the scenes. Watershed starts off with a diver telling a couple a story about how he once went down with a diving buddy, and upon realizing that his partner was falling down into an abyss, the diver saved him because he had never felt a purer love for a human being. Later in the story, however, when the woman is at the funeral for her husband, the diver approaches the woman again and retells the tale. The diver actually doesn’t save the man and just lets him go while he floated in the water suspended alone. In both occurrences, the diver’s story is parallel to the state of the couple. When they were together and in love, the diver saved the man. When the woman was left alone by the tragic death of her husband, the diver too had stood alone. However, as Claire Hopley states in the Washington Post, “his reminders of the people that may never have emerged from its depths are eerie and alarming.” The revision to the diver’s story is a turning point for Celie. He says that the love was all true, but only after he couldn’t see him anymore, when he was “just staring sown into that trench, just suspended there alone.” With the loss of her husband, Celie is alone as well, and the diver’s story is tied to hers not only in the deaths due to water, but also in their realization of the love they have for the people they lost. Groff uses water because of its unruly nature, and it parallels the major and unforeseen events that occur in Celie’s life. John Marshall, a book critic who wrote for the Seattle Post, describes Groff’s thematic specialty as “where her perceptive vision is focused - turns out to be turning-point moments, often for women characters - turning-point moments sometimes not recognized as that until it is too late.”

The theme of water is also threaded throughout the story, tying the piece into the title of Watershed. In the small town that the couple lives, it rains constantly. The husband dies because he hydroplaned while driving in his truck and a tree branch smashed through his chest. Ultimately, though, he dies of Hydrocephalus, otherwise known as “water in the brain.” When the woman is driving home during one of her college years, she hears on the radio that an old couple died by jumping into the Niagara Falls together. These themes of water tie into the concluding paragraph and the point of Groff’s story, that “there is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned.” This ending is not necessarily described as a happy one, but it is satisfying in the sense that the readers can relate to Celie and the unfortunate events that have occurred in her life.

But themes in Lauren Groff’s collection are not just restricted to stories. Throughout the collection, there is the theme of birds that encompasses many of the stories. In Watershed, for example, when Celie’s husband says that he wants to build her a house before they get married, he states that “every bird needs her nest (Groff pg 171).” In the last story of the collection, Delicate Edible Birds, we see the character of Bern struggle when she is presented with a delicacy of a tiny bird while eating dinner with the her lover, the Mayor of Philadelphia, in France. While everyone else veiled their faces with napkins as they ate the birds, Bern wrapped the bird in a napkin and later dropped the carcass from the hotel balcony, “setting it free, she thought, though it dropped like a lead weight to the ground for some prowling beast to eat (Groff pg 288).” This occurrence is important because it helps the readers later understand why Bern, who is notorious for having affairs and sleeping with lots of men, refuses to have sex with the Fascist man who is keeping them hostage and will let everyone free if she complies. She too wants to be free, and holds to her choice of not having sex with their captive. Yet as the time nears when the Nazi’s might come and find them, the men start to urge Bern to comply with the man’s wishes. Bern is the bird, trying to set herself free, but who gets dropped to the ground like the lead weight and has sex with the prowling beast.

Overall, however, the reader wonders why Groff might have chosen birds as a major theme throughout her collection. As Connie Ogle states in the Miami Herald, “the women in Lauren Groff’s debut story collection exist in varying stages of unrest.” These women are emotionally trapped and are struggling to break free and fly. Groff uses the birds to convey the point that all women go through experiences in which they must learn lessons and try to overcome challenges given to them.

“And it is a happy ending, perhaps, in the way that myths and fairy tales have happy endings; only if one forgets the bloody, dark middles, the fifty dismembered girls in the vat, the parents who sent their children into the woods with only a crust of bread. I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.”

Tied Together by Haunting - Draft 3

Third Draft on Delicate Edible Birds

Throughout Groff’s collection, she utilizes several points of view as a tool to emphasize the character’s struggle and give the readers insight into the characters’ emotions. Although second person narration is rare, it is absolutely vital to the story called Watershed. Celie, the narrator, recounts the details of her marriage to a specified “you,” who readers discover is her husband. With her profession in the story being a storyteller, it is fitting that Groff chose to use this point of view. As the story continues, Celie reveals that her husband is dead. After Celie starts an argument about how she hates the town and all the people in it, her husband leaves in a rain storm and ends up hydroplaning and crashing his truck into a tree which sticks a branch through his chest. He dies later in the hospital from Hydrocephalus. Groff’s use of the second person point of view turns the reader into the character of the dead husband, which is who Celie is ultimately addressing. She is retelling the tale to him, almost as if by his bedside, hoping he will wake up. Celie asks, “did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm (Groff pg 186)?” It helps the reader understand Celie’s grief about the loss of her husband and the guilt that she feels. However, when Celie reveals later that “I see you now just leaving rooms I am in,” the reader can see that she is still haunted by the incident (Groff pg 188). By using this perspective, Groff allows the readers to fully grasp the vulnerable and stricken state of Celie, who is intimately recounting their relationship to her dead husband.

In Watershed, Groff also uses the theme of water to convey the relationship between the untamed water and the unpredictable situations that occur in someone’s life. Throughout the story, water appears in many of the scenes. Watershed starts off with a diver telling a couple a story about how he once went down with a diving buddy, and upon realizing that his partner was falling down into an abyss, the diver saved him because he had never felt a purer love for a human being. Later in the story, however, when the woman is at the funeral for her husband, the diver approaches the woman again and retells the tale. The diver actually doesn’t save the man and just lets him go while he floated in the water suspended alone. In both occurrences, the diver’s story is parallel to the state of the couple. When they were together and in love, the diver saved the man. When the woman was left alone by the tragic death of her husband, the diver too had stood alone. However, as Claire Hopley states in the Washington Post, “his reminders of the people that may never have emerged from its depths are eerie and alarming.” The revision to the diver’s story is a turning point for Celie. He says that the love was all true, but only after he couldn’t see him anymore, when he was “just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone.” With the loss of her husband, Celie is alone as well, and the diver’s story is tied to hers not only in the deaths due to water, but also in their realization of the love they have for the people they lost. Groff uses water because of its unruly nature, and it parallels the major and unforeseen events that occur in Celie’s life. John Marshall, a book critic who wrote for the Seattle Post, describes Groff’s thematic specialty as “where her perceptive vision is focused - turns out to be turning-point moments, often for women characters - turning-point moments sometimes not recognized as that until it is too late.”

In the last story of the collection, “Delicate Edible Birds,” point of view plays a particularly important role. Groff uses the third person omniscient perspective, another fairly rare point of view. Though the majority of the story is in the perspective of the woman character, Bern, occasionally the story flips into the perspective of one of the four men. Groff puts us in the mind of all the four men at one point or another in the story. She does this for one reason in particular, which is so the readers can understand the various perspectives on the conflict with Bern. The five characters in the story, four men and one woman, are all journalists, with the exception of one who is a photographer. Set during World War II, the group is following news of the war, and their car breaks down just outside of Paris in front of a fascist man’s house, who holds them hostage until Bern agrees to have sex with him. Bern refuses to have sex with him, and at first, all the men seem to understand. However, as the time draws nearer to when the Nazi’s will possibly come for them, Groff allows us into their minds and we understand why they start to change their perspective on Bern having sex with the man. While at first the men claimed that “nothing of the sort can happen, of course” and that there was “no question...for the principle of the thing” the men all have different reasons for wanting to be free from the threat of the oncoming Nazi’s (Groff pg 285). Parnell has a family back home in England, and Lucci has a wife who has disappeared, yet he still wants to live in hopes that she is alive. The men slowly start to believe that Bern, who is notorious for sleeping with numbers of men, should “just do it and get it over with” and when all of them turn their backs on her, she complies (Groff pg 286). Without the use of this all-knowing perspective, the readers wouldn’t have the insight into the men’s minds to understand their desperation and reasons why they eventually disregard Bern and all quietly agree that she needs to comply.

In “Delicate Edible Birds”, we also see the character of Bern struggle when she is presented with a delicacy of a tiny bird while eating dinner with the her lover, the Mayor of Philadelphia, in France. While everyone else veiled their faces with napkins as they ate the birds, Bern wrapped the bird in a napkin and later dropped the carcass from the hotel balcony, “setting it free, she thought, though it dropped like a lead weight to the ground for some prowling beast to eat (Groff pg 288).” This occurrence is important because it helps the readers later understand why Bern, who is notorious for having affairs and sleeping with lots of men, refuses to have sex with the Fascist man who is keeping them hostage and will let everyone free if she complies. She too wants to be free, and holds to her choice of not having sex with their captive. Yet as the time nears when the Nazi’s might come and find them, the men start to urge Bern to comply with the man’s wishes. Bern is the bird, trying to set herself free, but who gets dropped to the ground like the lead weight and has sex with the prowling beast.

While first person perspective is very common in stories, the point of view in Lucky Chow Fun is essential to lead the readers into the mind and thoughts of the main character, a round and unattractive teenage girl named Lollie. The readers can see the small town of Templeton through Lollie's eyes, and this especially important when the town is hit by a huge event, the discovery that the local restaurant called Lucky Chow Fun was a secretive whorehouse. When Lollie was in the parking lot of the restaurant one night before the event, she almost knocked into one of the many Chinese girls who worked there, simply mumbling and stepping away, not really looking at the girl she had almost trampled because “nobody in Templeton cared to figure out who the girls were” (Groff pg 8). Yet Lollie vividly describes the girls, saying the the girls were like “ghosts in white uniforms chopping things, frying things, talking quietly to one another” (Groff pg 9). When she hears on the news the next day that one of the girls died, and this lead to the discovery of the whorehouse, Lollie is shocked and we see the impact that the tragedy has not only on her, but on the town. Her mother’s boyfriend had apparently been one of the names on the list to visit Lucky Chow Fun, and numbers of wives discovered the husband’s unfaithfulness, leading to a scandal in the town and casting the Chinese girls as the enemies. Though Lollie admits that she forgot about the poor Lucky Chow Fun girls, years later she dreams about “the seven ghosts” and imagines the terrible events that they had to endure. It is important that Groff uses Lollie’s perspective in this story, the perspective of a girl the same age as the girls who were discovered to have been taken from their homes in China and placed into a whorehouse. In this way, the first person perspective serves to take the readers on the journey of a coming-of-age event that greatly impacts Lollie.

Birds also serve as an important theme in Lucky Chow Fun. Lollie’s younger sister, Pot, collects taxidermied birds that are scattered around her bedroom. However, Lollie avoids her room as much as possible because she had “one particular gyrfalcon perched on her dresser that seemed malicious, if not downright evil, ready to scratch at your jugular if you were to saunter innocently by” (Groff pg 3). Though the birds are en escape for Pot, they serve to parallel the girls who work at the whorehouse. Groff does not use real birds, but instead decides that Pot will have a collection of stuffed birds who sit on shelves, quiet, fake, and dead on the inside. In a similar way, Lollie describes the girl at Lucky Chow Fun as ghosts, yet they more so resemble the birds. The girls were always quiet, only speaking softly to each other, and though they were alive, they weren’t really living. Lollie later describes the girls as “wordless, as always” (Groff pg 39). Lollie’s reaction to the birds mirrors the girls. She tends to avoid them. On the outside, they resembled people, like the taxidermied birds resembled live birds, however on the inside, they too were stuffed and mind as well have been sitting on Pot’s shelf.

Overall, however, the reader wonders why Groff might have chosen birds as a major theme throughout her collection. As Connie Ogle states in the Miami Herald, “the women in Lauren Groff’s debut story collection exist in varying stages of unrest.” These women are emotionally trapped and are struggling to break free and fly. Groff uses the birds to convey the point that all women go through experiences in which they must learn lessons and try to overcome challenges given to them.

Throughout Groff’s collection, she stays away from simply presenting the reader with a happy ending and instead leaves them with endings in which the characters are changed. But this does not mean they are necessarily changed in a good way. In many of the endings, the reader can infer that the characters will still be struggling. In Watershed, for example, Celie’s husband is still dead, and she must come to the harsh reality that there are things in life that are out of her control. Groff shies away from taking the easy way out in her stories, and prefers to end the stories more realistically. In an ideal world, Bern probably would have held to her morals and not slept with the Fascist, while Lucky Chow Fun wouldn’t have turned the small town of Templeton into a mass of scandal that broke families apart. However, Groff paints realistic characters by making them not always take the right path, by questioning their morals, and by not coming to a complete realization of who they are. In this way, Groff pulls empathy from her readers, and portrays situations and decisions that women can relate to. Lauren Groff best sums up her idea of happy endings in her first story, Lucky Chow Fun:

And though our own personal stories and lives have a middle that is haunting, it is the very string that Groff uses to tie our experiences to her stories, giving us reassurance that we are not alone in our challenges.

Tied Together by Haunting - Draft 4

Tied Together by Haunting

Throughout Groff’s collection, she utilizes several points of view as a tool to emphasize the character’s struggle and give the readers insight into the characters’ emotions. Although second person narration is rare, it is absolutely vital to the story called Watershed. Celie, the narrator, recounts the details of her marriage to a specified “you,” who readers discover is her husband. With her profession in the story being a storyteller, it is fitting that Groff chose to use this point of view. As the story continues, Celie reveals that her husband is dead. After Celie starts an argument about how she hates the town and all the people in it, her husband leaves in a rain storm and ends up hydroplaning and crashing his truck into a tree which sticks a branch through his chest. He dies later in the hospital from Hydrocephalus. Groff’s use of the second person point of view turns the reader into the character of the dead husband, which is who Celie is ultimately addressing. She is retelling the tale to him, almost as if by his bedside, hoping he will wake up. Celie asks, “did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm (Groff pg 186)?” It helps the reader understand Celie’s grief about the loss of her husband and the guilt that she feels. However, when Celie reveals later that “I see you now just leaving rooms I am in,” the reader can see that she is still haunted by the incident (Groff pg 188). By using this perspective, Groff allows the readers to fully grasp the vulnerable and stricken state of Celie, who is intimately recounting their relationship to her dead husband.

In Watershed, Groff also uses the theme of water to convey the relationship between the untamed water and the unpredictable situations that occur in someone’s life. Throughout the story, water appears in many of the scenes. Watershed starts off with a diver telling a couple a story about how he once went down with a diving buddy, and upon realizing that his partner was falling down into an abyss, the diver saved him because he had never felt a purer love for a human being. Later in the story, however, when the woman is at the funeral for her husband, the diver approaches the woman again and retells the tale. The diver actually doesn’t save the man and just lets him go while he floated in the water suspended alone. In both occurrences, the diver’s story is parallel to the state of the couple. When they were together and in love, the diver saved the man. When the woman was left alone by the tragic death of her husband, the diver too had stood alone. However, as Claire Hopley states in the Washington Post, “his reminders of the people that may never have emerged from its depths are eerie and alarming.” The revision to the diver’s story is a turning point for Celie. He says that the love was all true, but only after he couldn’t see him anymore, when he was “just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone.” With the loss of her husband, Celie is alone as well, and the diver’s story is tied to hers not only in the deaths due to water, but also in their realization of the love they have for the people they lost. Groff uses water because of its unruly nature, and it parallels the major and unforeseen events that occur in Celie’s life. John Marshall, a book critic who wrote for the Seattle Post, describes Groff’s thematic specialty as “where her perceptive vision is focused - turns out to be turning-point moments, often for women characters - turning-point moments sometimes not recognized as that until it is too late.”

In the last story of the collection, “Delicate Edible Birds,” point of view plays a particularly important role. Groff uses the third person omniscient perspective, another fairly rare point of view. Though the majority of the story is in the perspective of the woman character, Bern, occasionally the story flips into the perspective of one of the four men. Groff puts us in the mind of all the four men at one point or another in the story. She does this for one reason in particular, which is so the readers can understand the various perspectives on the conflict with Bern. The five characters in the story, four men and one woman, are all journalists, with the exception of one who is a photographer. Set during World War II, the group is following news of the war, and their car breaks down just outside of Paris in front of a fascist man’s house, who holds them hostage until Bern agrees to have sex with him. Bern refuses to have sex with him, and at first, all the men seem to understand. However, as the time draws nearer to when the Nazi’s will possibly come for them, Groff allows us into their minds and we understand why they start to change their perspective on Bern having sex with the man. While at first the men claimed that “nothing of the sort can happen, of course” and that there was “no question...for the principle of the thing” the men all have different reasons for wanting to be free from the threat of the oncoming Nazi’s (Groff pg 285). Parnell has a family back home in England, and Lucci has a wife who has disappeared, yet he still wants to live in hopes that she is alive. The men slowly start to believe that Bern, who is notorious for sleeping with numbers of men, should “just do it and get it over with” and when all of them turn their backs on her, she complies (Groff pg 286). Despite this all-knowing perspective, Groff only goes into the minds of others on a need-to-know basis. As Carolyn See states in a piece on point of view, an author should only go into a character’s mind “if they absolutely need to think or feel something…otherwise, let them alone” (See pg 151). Without the use of this all-knowing perspective, the readers wouldn’t have the insight into the men’s minds to understand their desperation and reasons why they eventually disregard Bern and all quietly agree that she needs to comply.

In “Delicate Edible Birds”, we also see the character of Bern struggle when she is presented with a delicacy of a tiny bird while eating dinner with her lover, the Mayor of Philadelphia, in France. While everyone else veiled their faces with napkins as they ate the birds, Bern wrapped the bird in a napkin and later dropped the carcass from the hotel balcony, “setting it free, she thought, though it dropped like a lead weight to the ground for some prowling beast to eat (Groff pg 288).” This occurrence is important because it helps the readers later understand why Bern, who is notorious for having affairs and sleeping with lots of men, refuses to have sex with the Fascist man who is keeping them hostage and will let everyone free if she complies. She too wants to be free, and holds to her choice of not having sex with their captive. Yet as the time nears when the Nazi’s might come and find them, the men start to urge Bern to comply with the man’s wishes. Bern is the bird, trying to set herself free, but who gets dropped to the ground like the lead weight and has sex with the prowling beast.

While first person perspective is very common in stories, the point of view in Lucky Chow Fun is essential to lead the readers into the mind and thoughts of the main character, a round and unattractive teenage girl named Lollie. The readers can see the small town of Templeton through Lollie's eyes, and this especially important when the town is hit by a huge event, the discovery that the local restaurant called Lucky Chow Fun was a secretive whorehouse. When Lollie was in the parking lot of the restaurant one night before the event, she almost knocked into one of the many Chinese girls who worked there, simply mumbling and stepping away, not really looking at the girl she had almost trampled because “nobody in Templeton cared to figure out who the girls were” (Groff pg 8). Yet Lollie vividly describes the girls, saying the girls were like “ghosts in white uniforms chopping things, frying things, talking quietly to one another” (Groff pg 9). When she hears on the news the next day that one of the girls died, and this lead to the discovery of the whorehouse, Lollie is shocked and we see the impact that the tragedy has not only on her, but on the town. Her mother’s boyfriend had apparently been one of the names on the list to visit Lucky Chow Fun, and numbers of wives discovered the husband’s unfaithfulness, leading to a scandal in the town and casting the Chinese girls as the enemies. Though Lollie admits that she forgot about the poor Lucky Chow Fun girls, years later she dreams about “the seven ghosts” and imagines the terrible events that they had to endure. It is important that Groff uses Lollie’s perspective in this story, the perspective of a girl the same age as the girls who were discovered to have been taken from their homes in China and placed into a whorehouse. In this way, the first person perspective serves to take the readers on the journey of a coming-of-age event that greatly impacts Lollie.

Overall, however, the reader wonders why Groff might have chosen birds as a major theme throughout her collection. As Connie Ogle states in the Miami Herald, “the women in Lauren Groff’s debut story collection exist in varying stages of unrest.” These women are emotionally trapped and are struggling to break free and fly. Groff uses the birds to convey the point that all women go through experiences in which they must learn lessons and try to overcome challenges given to them.

Despite Groff’s varying perspectives on stories and use of themes to help convey her messages, there is one story in particular that weakens her collection. Fugue is a story that is very complex and takes time coming together. Groff presents three different sub-stories and then attempts to tie them all together at the end. To the reader, the story stretches out a bit too long, and the readers are in a circle of sub-stories, wondering what the point is. As John Marshall states, “ Groff’s arching ambition for the story results in too many details withheld in hopes of adding mystery, too many characters and their too complex personal stories, too much confusing artifice.”
Throughout Groff’s collection, she stays away from simply presenting the reader with a happy ending and instead leaves them with endings in which the characters are changed. But this does not mean they are necessarily changed in a good way. In many of the endings, the reader can infer that the characters will still be struggling. In Watershed, for example, Celie’s husband is still dead, and she must come to the harsh reality that there are things in life that are out of her control. Groff shies away from taking the easy way out in her stories, and prefers to end the stories more realistically. In an ideal world, Bern probably would have held to her morals and not slept with the Fascist, while Lucky Chow Fun wouldn’t have turned the small town of Templeton into a mass of scandal that broke families apart. However, Groff paints realistic characters by making them not always take the right path, by questioning their morals, and by not coming to a complete realization of who they are. In this way, Groff pulls empathy from her readers, and portrays situations and decisions that women can relate to. Lauren Groff best sums up her idea of happy endings in her first story, Lucky Chow Fun: