Summary Of The Fall Of A City By Alden Nowlan

People believe that stereotyping is an innocent act which should be taken lightly, others take this as a joke but these actions can cause serious damage. Following Teddy, a young boy who has his dreams crushed by merely stereotypical actions in “The Fall of a City” by Alden Nowlan. The first example of stereotypical actions displayed in the story is when the uncle and the aunt are both given stereotypical roles as that the uncle. Moreover, the(“man of the house”) who works all day doing hard labor as a fisherman then coming home, then resting and afterwards reads the newspaper while the aunt is working as a housewife and just cleans around the house. Furthermore, this is proven by the quote in the story “As his aunt gathered up the dishes, …show more content…
This act by the uncle hurt Teddy by having him no longer express himself and lose his self-esteem or confidence which is a harsh to a young boy. “Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful”(Mead , n.d).Above all the final stereotype is that Teddy’s belief of his parents not being as intelligent as him this is shown when his vocabulary takes a drastic change in his “imaginative” world vs his real world. When he’s in his imaginative world, he says “through the square below rode squadrons of lancers and horse artillery; behind them marched regiments of soldiers. Grasping the diamond-studded hilt of his sword, King Theodore watched his army march out to give battle to the enemy” (Nowlan 130-131) afterwards in the real world speaks like “I’m comin’, I told yuh!” (Nowlan