Response 2/4

Jei Woo

In her collection of stories, Moral Disorder, author Margaret Atwood demonstrates her mastery of the crucial element of plot. Specifically, she has a very distinct way of developing her plot through time. Her stories all possess a certain progressive build-up of tension. Each story begins with hints of what the main conflict of the story might be. As the story moves on, Atwood layers her writing with loads of imagery and foreshadowing. The underlying conflict then bleeds through into the story gradually, and Atwood finally finishes off with the resolve when the forces in the story are ready to be reconciled. Two of her stories, “Moral Disorder” and “The Labrador Fiasco, exhibit this exact format of plot development.

In “Moral Disorder,” the protagonist Nell begins to start a new life with her lover Tig in a new town called Garrett. The conditions of Nell and Tig’s love affair are quite ambiguous; the reader discovers that Nell is not Tig’s legal spouse or the mother of his children. Though the story seems to begin on a happy note, the underlying problem is revealed even in the first few pages. “Nell didn’t say it wasn’t the windows, not the wallpaper. But paint would help” (117). Obviously, there’s a problem, and Atwood begins to hint at it more often as the story moves along. When Nell begins to work on her kitchen garden, she takes interest in sharp implements. Yet, she stays away from axes because “she didn’t think she could handle an axe” (120). There is some need for reconciliation with the axe symbolism, and Atwood doesn’t fail to do that at the end when Nell reveals her deep secret: she knows that Tig doesn’t want them to have babies.

Atwood demonstrates her skill in developing plot in her other short story, “Labrador Fiasco.” From the first page (which is only half an actual page), we learn that the narrator’s mother is reading to her father. They are both elderly people, and her father had suffered from a stroke six years ago. However, looking closely, the first passage introduces so much more. The first sentence is “It’s October, but which October?” which introduces the idea of perhaps Alzheimer’s or dementia. Throughout the story, as Atwood shines light on the father’s unfortunate situation, she uses phrases like “time passes” to again hint at how the family is being suffocated under the constraints of time and its effect on the human body. Like in “Moral Disorder,” Atwood ends the short story with the most powerful scene in the story, in which the narrator attempts to console her father who remains disabled and helpless from the aftermath of his stroke.

Atwood never fails once to show how gracefully and powerfully she can develop her story. However, I felt that a great portion of each story was mere detail: descriptions of Tig’s sons growing older, what Hubbard and Wallace are eating for supper, etc. I learned today in my Literary Interpretation class of one of T.S. Eliot’s quote, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” While reading, I was anxiously waiting for Atwood to reveal the big outcome at the end. Though Atwood definitely has an extremely refined control over her plot, I was expecting short stories to be engaging and brilliant all the way through. Maybe that’s my own problem.