A Joke
And the punchline is he's miserable.
Big hero with the sled convinces young woman to go down the hill. Nadenka is terrified. Not our fearless narrator. He's not scared of some nasty ice hill. He's scared of life, and most importantly, love.
So he makes his innermost feelings into a joke. He doesn't have the guts to tell Nadenka straight to her face how he loves her.
Nadenka is petrified to go down the hill on the sled but she does it -- she takes the plunge. And then she becomes entranced with hearing those sweet words which our hero whispers to her while rushing down the hill. She even ventures down the hill on her own to verify where those lovely words originate from.
They come from our narrator who is a bona fide coward. He never tells her how he feels but instead runs away. (Macho, isn't he?)
The result is Nadenka gets on with her life and gets married and has three children and a touching memory that lingers with her and our dashing hero seems to only have regrets and a sick joke to lie with.
That's pretty funny.
after the first reading, I thought that the joke was that he thought his past infatuation with nadia was a joke. I thought he was making light of the value of her life because although she's moved on, he's saying that she's achieved a predictable life. her life progressed into a meaningless, loveless marriage with a few offspring. I thought that the joke was the contrast between her sedentary, stable current life and her lost capability of true love, like when she was naive frightened and passionate on that hill.
ReplyDeletebut now I can read the story with the other interpretation. maybe the joke is on him and how he is still lingering onto those old memories and desperately hoping that he is still important to her.
I adapted this short story into a film several years ago. What first drew me to the story was that I totally fell for the ending. It caught me by surprise and I had a reaction to it. I thought, this would be interesting as film. I also felt that the story was universal. Love can be one-sided. It can be manipulative. And young love, especially, can be very idealistic, fantastical, and naive. It also made me think about the gender differences that still persist to this day. Young women are still expected by society to get married, become wives and mother's early on, whereas men can "sew their oats" for much longer before society begins to question why they haven't settled down yet. This really underscores that idea. It the boy in this story felt it was permissible to treat her this way, though, the you could interpret the tone at the end as regret.
ReplyDeleteHere's the link to my short film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKgUgpr288
Very good film Andy.
DeleteThanks for sharing.
He's an unreliable narrator, by repressing the memory of his cowardice and regret he assigns thoughts and doubts to Nadenka that are not true. She knew she was loved and she knew she was being observed. She hoped that he could conquer his fear, she played along to relieve the pressure, she even signaled her interest and tried to encourage him by facing her own fear of the slope. Has he matues, he has to know why he did it, he just can't accept it, since it's irreversible.
ReplyDelete