Thursday, June 16, 2022

The Five Dollar Bill - Dorothy West - 151 / 365 of reading one short story every day.


In the story, The Five Dollar Bill”, a little girl named Judy witnesses and is affected deeply by her mother's duplicity. West's narrator comments that adults rarely “profit by childhood experiences” , because they forget the “suffering and tears” as they view the past through a “sentimental haze” of memory. They rarely learn from their mistakes and inflict similar hurt upon their future children.



The protagonist of the story, whose parents live apart, sees childhood as ``full of unrequited love, and suffering, and tears''. She is unloved and years for a happy family similar to what she sees in the school.



Themes of the story are desperation , poverty and innocence of children and how it can be scarred by futile behaviour of adults.
This story is also from West's short story collection The Richer, The Poorer.



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