The title of "A Silver Dish" references the silver dish that Woody remembers his now-deceased father, Morris, having once stolen.
Out of money for his business, Morris, accompanied by Woody, traveled through a blizzard to the home of Mrs. Skoglund in order to ask the woman for fifty dollars. While Mrs. Skoglund and her servant were out of the room praying, Morris picked a lock on the woman's cabinet and removed a silver dish from it, hiding the item in his pants in order to sneak it out of the house. This thievery stunned Woody, who fought his father to try to get him to return the dish to its proper place. By the time Mrs. Skoglund and the servant had returned, Woody had been thoroughly beaten. Morris managed to leave the home with a check for fifty dollars and the silver dish he'd snatched.
This theft causes trouble later; Woody chooses to defend his father's reputation by claiming that he is innocent, despite knowing this lie could cost him his position at the seminary. It also becomes a point of contention between Woody and Morris, as they continue to argue about it for the remainder of their lives.
Ultimately, the theft of the silver dish represents Woody's departure from his previous role as "foil" to Morris' "anti-hero." Although he used to side with his mother, morally-speaking, Woody has been altered by the act of covering up his father's crime, which has “carried him back to his side of the line, blood of his blood.” Woody lives out the rest of his life in a manner that is much more his father's speed —dancing around a life of sin and rejecting the religious lifestyle of his mother and the other women around him.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
What is the meaning of the title of "A Silver Dish" by Saul Bellow?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment