Suggestions are
welcome. Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .Study Guide to
Sherwood Anderson's "I'm a Fool"
Allocate at least three separate readings to the story. (Particular passages will repay additional re-readings.) You will need to print out this study guide to have it on hand while you work through the story.
Begin by seeing what you can turn up in the way of a brief biographical sketch of Anderson (at the Sherwood Anderson Foundation). (Don't go looking for anything else there until you are finished with your third reading.) Then just plunge into the story and see what happens. Try to arrange a quite time so that you can get all the way through in one sitting. Your main agenda of curiosity should be the standard one that comes into play as soon as we realize we are dealing with a participant narrator.
If you've seen the film before you get into the story, be asking: Does the story strike you as having the same mood as that conveyed by the film? Do you detect any differences in the way you feel towards the central character in the story than you did towards the "same" character in the film?
Do not read further until you have completed this initial reading of the story.
Before reading the story, study closely the following questions. Then work through the story again (perhaps in a couple of sessions) to see what you can turn up as material that might be relevant for getting answers to them.
1. What is the narrator's attitude toward Burt? (How long does Burt remain in the story?)
2. In addition to the central incident in the story, where do we find the narrator enjoying putting people on, acting a role, impressing the sort of folks he calls "yaps"?
3. What are we to make of the narrator's behavior in the West Hotel? How does he evidently think we'll receive it? Does he miscalculate - or has he pretty well anticipate our reaction?
4. What are some of the "sayings" (or proverb-like maxims) that the narrator keeps advertising he's alsays endorsed? (What do we infer is his assumption about the way we'll react to this?)
5. What is the narrator's attitude towards cheating on the racetrack?
6. What is the name of Mr. Mather's horse that Bob Grench is racing? What are Mr. Mather's ideas about drinking alcohol?
How do these details relate to the narrator's conduct towards his mother and family?
How might this pattern be significant? (Consider more than one possibility, and ask yourself whether one is more convincing in the case at hand than the other[s].)
7. What comparison does the narrator use to describe the way in which the horse they bet on ran in the second, third, and fourth heats?
What "ring" does this have, in light of the narrator's own situation at the time?
8. The narrator takes pains to assure us that Lucy wasn't stuck on him for the reason we might have supposed (what is this?), but for a very different reason (namely?)
How does this, if true, increase the irony of the narrator's predicament?
What motives might he have for making sure the audience appreciates this fact (if it is one)? Are some of these motives more "out front" than others?
Is the narrator's theory here a likely one, on balance, or is it, at best, probably only a part of the truth? (Conversely: would it be overly suspicious on our part to impeach the narrator's judgment in this matter?)
Do not read further until you have completed this second reading of the story.
Many of the questions in the following agenda of curiosity have to do with noticing patterns of recurrent behavior, and with what to make of these once we've noticed them. You may find it useful to review the discussion of motifs. Note that sometimes these patterns of behavior are to be found within the story narrated. Sometimes, though, they show up in the narration of that story. Do any show up in both?
1. Make a note of all the places where the narrator gets "off track" and has to break off some digression into which he has wandered, in order to get back to the main lines of his story.
In each case, ask yourself what unconscious factors may have "steered" the narrator down the path we regard as the off the subject at hand? (Consider that they may have something to do with some point or other that the narrator seems bent on driving at. And/ or: might there be something that he's determined to avoid having to get into?)
Ask then why anyone would feel the need to keep harping on such a point. What does the obsession reveal about the narrator's fears?
What in turn might be the origin of those fears?
2. Make another note of all the places where the narrator implicitly or explicitly brags to you, his listener, in the act of telling the story (as distinct from bragging to Wilbur and Lucy, as an event within the story he is telling).
What, in each case, seems to be the subject of his boasting? Is there any pattern to the kind of thing he boasts about?
What must be his attitude towards himself if he feels the need, as he evidently does, to keep making these points before his audience?
Does he seem to be doing this deliberately, by calculation - or compulsively, even unconsciously?
3. Make a note of those places where he seems to insist on the doctrine that "all men are created equal," in the sense that no one is superior to anyone else (or at least that he - and we, as members of the audience, whom he addresses familiarly - are as good as anybody else, despite appearances to the contrary produced by social differentiation, by class divisions).
Make a note, too, of all those places where he seems to express the opinion that he himself is a superior sort of person, despite superficial appearances due to the accidents of circumstance.
What are the characteristics that distinguish the sort of people he regards himself as superior to?
How would he classify the sorts of people who constitute the audience that he is telling his story to?
Do we notice any inconsistencies in his attitudes?
If so, how should we account for them?
4. What are the narrator's present circumstances - that is, his situation at the moment he is telling the story (to us)? For example:
Is he married? Divorced? a bachelor?
Is he a significantly older person than he was when the events he narrates took place? Or did the events he reports take place fairly recently?
What do you suppose is his present job? What sort of thing does he probably do for a living?
What kind of people make up his audience? Where might he be sitting while he's telling this story? (There are of course different possibilities. But what do the various likely candidates have in common?)
Has he been a great success in life? in our estimation? in his own? (Of course, there are different measures of "success." You'll want to consider whatever you think are the most relevant ones here.) How would you explain how things have turned out for him? Would his own answer be the same, or different?
5. Make a note of all the places where the narrator makes a point of punishing himself in front of us, his audience.
Does anything in his behavior in this regard strike us as excessive, embarrassing, neurotic?
6. What kind of character or personality does the narrator exhibit "today," - i.e., at the time when we are to imagine he's telling us his story?
How does this personality relate to the personality he reveals was his when he was the youngster who had the adventure he relates?
How are we to account for the answer to the previous question? (If the two are different, what has contributed to the change? If the two are basically the same, is this a good thing, or disappointing? How is it that he hasn't changed since?)
How are we to use that answer? That is, what might it in turn help to explain?
Suggestions are
welcome. Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .
Contents copyright © 1999 by Lyman A.
Baker.
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This page last updated 02 September 2004.