3. Summary
The narrator recollects his romance with an Italian nurse while he was
wounded and in the hospital. On a hot evening in Padua, Italy, some people
carried him up to the roof to look at the town. The others went down again
when it got dark and the searchlights came on. Luz and he went to bed
together. She took night duty for three months so that she could be with
him. She prepared the table for his operation. Then, when he was on
crutches, he went around taking nighttime temperatures so that she did not
have to get out of bed. Everyone knew about them. Before he went back to
the war, they prayed. They wanted to get married, but they did not have the
right paperwork or enough time. Luz wrote to him often, but they were
delivered all together. They decided that after the war, he would go to New
York to get a job, and she would come afterward. They left each other while
still quarreling about her not coming with him. He left for America. She
stayed behind to open a hospital. There, the major of an Italian battalion
made love to her. She wrote to the American that their romance had only
been boy-girl love. Now she had found adult love. This major did not marry
her, though. Her American love never wrote back. Soon thereafter, he
contracted gonorrhea from a department store employee while riding in a
cab through a residential area of Chicago.
4. Structure analysis
• An open plot structure.
• Psychological short story.
• The third person narration.
• Colloquial word usage.
5. Plot
Lack of exposition – there is no sense of time or
place. Author just names cities and we know that
story unravels during war (no mentioning about
which war)
Lack of description – we don’t know how the main
characters look or what their daily life was/is.
Lack of denouncement – story ends with main
character being in Chicago.
6. Stylistic device
Antithesis - “and she expected, absolutely
unexpectedly, to be married in the spring.”
Irony – ‘’ living in the muddy, rainy town in the
winter, the major of the battalion made love to
Luz, and she had never known Italians before…’’
‘’ A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a
sales girl in a loop department store while riding in
a taxicab through Lincoln Park.’’
7. Theme – love and relationship between man and
woman.
Also can be seen symbolism:
Europe-mature America- young ‘’ been a boy and
girl affair’’
War-like relationship : never ends with happy ending.
Idea - after-war emptiness in people. ‘’ Lost
generation’’.
