Janus By Ann Beattie Analysis

Improved Essays
Imagine a bowl being the object of your love life. “Janus” by Anne Beattie portrays the meaning of the special bowl, but more in depth of how Andrea’s life really is. However, in the short story, Andrea realizes that the bowl has brought numerous good things to her life. Anne Beattie conveys an underlying meaning of how the bowl partakes in Andrea’s life and the symbolic message it sends to readers.
Andrea is a land operator with high quality appearances. She has a good spouse, great financial security, and an occupation in which she exceeds the expectations. Some portion of her prosperity at offering land is her capacity to utilize traps to make any house pleasurable and attractive. Often, Andrea will bring Mondo, her dog, to a house, hoping the buyers enjoy her canine cutie. Her most normal and effective ploy is to convey her unique bowl to the house, a bowl that she says is a wonderful catch, since it is both low-key and recognizable to buyers. She sets the bowl in an easy seeing place, typically on an end table for buyers to see. The bowl fits in any place. Continuously, Andrea leaves the bowl alone. It sits alone at home, as
…show more content…
Beattie presents the bowl as impeccable, which is an immediate indication that something unique in the story must be the inverse of flawless, Andrea's life. The bowl goes about as an image of opportunity and favor that she is endeavoring to clutch and in certainty does not need her significant other to make her happy. The forlornness topic all through the story is available in her own home, and the way that she tries to counterfeit a home-like feel in a considerable lot of her show homes. The way that Andrea feels void and alone in her home mirrors the contention in her life and that she is miserable. Andrea is battling in her life and ends up noticeably fixated on a bowl that is a material

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In the crevices between the bathroom tiles, mold sprouts as opportunistically as weeds do in the cracks, of sidewalks. Diane couldn't concentrate on General Hospital, because Santana her beagle who had been cooped up in the house all day, wanted to take a long walk around the lake. The blue, creamy frosting from the cupcake hung like a stalactite at the tip of poor George's nose, causing Michelle to giggle uncontrollably. Anthony wanted fried chicken for lunch, but the cafeteria offered only greenish meatballs with overcooked noodles and crispy meatloaf with lumpy mashed potatoes. To clean up the kitchen more quickly, Maria let Romeo, the family's German shepherd prewash the dishes with his fat, pink tongue.…

    • 239 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This is an article which is trying to figure out the differences between the lifestyle of neat people and sloppy people. This is to explain and find out if neat or sloppy people are more successful in life. I would like you to read this article and determine for yourself who is the more successful. Suzanne Britt’s essay talks about the differences between sloppy and neat people. She goes into a lot of time in showing how misunderstood and loving sloppy people are, while as for neat people she goes into a lot of detail in showing how insensitive and wasteful that these people are.…

    • 1986 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Janie Quotes And Analysis

    • 598 Words
    • 3 Pages

    2. Janie is initially attracted to each man differently in each one of her marriages. Her first marriage to Logan, was set up by her Nanny. “She could see no way for it to come about, but Nanny and the old folks had said it, so it must be so” (Hurston 21).…

    • 598 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the story Time Enough For Drums written by Ann Rinaldi there is a girl named Jemima Emerson. Jemima is a girl who helps her family out and is not afraid to get her hands dirty. She takes care of her family when they need help and she jumps right in at any given moment and ready for any challenge. When the men in Jemima’s family join the war for independence; she is faced with many struggles that define her as fearless, active and above all giving. Jemima Emerson is a girl of fearlessness.…

    • 484 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    She originally loves another person whom she lost, which is represented when the face of a different statue melts away when she tries to kiss it. Then she begins to overcome the loss when she looks for love in the other man, and faces obstacles to be with him. As their love grows, more barriers come between the two, such as the ground crumbling and walls erecting. The female character’s search for love is akin to Janie Crawford’s in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie is a woman who experiences two unsuccessful marriages and dreams for a passionate love, which she finds later in the novel with a man named Tea Cake.…

    • 1220 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Amelia Gray’s Gutshot Amelia Gray in her two short stories The Moment of Conception and Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover preserves and capitalizes her consistency to deliver grotesque, surreal parables that mask the simple attributes of the human condition to love, understand love, and the surreal journey as well as the destination that love can take one person. In The Moment of Conception Gray manages to capsulate the desire and emotional drive for her characters in the first sentence of the story, "We wanted a child so badly!" (Gray 138). And the dissection of this sentence can not only lay out a schematic for Gray’s writing style, but also acts as a way of immediately implementing characterization into the couple by making…

    • 1261 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    True Love

    • 1565 Words
    • 7 Pages

    However, as the story continues, she learns that she does not truly love to of them, while she does love her last marriage of Tea Cake. The novel explores Janie’s journey of love with the motif of the horizon as she goes from one marriage to another, figuring out true love is something that comes with both choice, and having a voice. The novel…

    • 1565 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lucy would spend the night with her grandmother twice a month. Mama Provi would read bedtime stories to Lucy and they would cook breakfast in the morning, but when Lucy came down with chicken pox she could not visit her grandmother downstairs. Nevertheless Mama Provi decides to take pot of arroz con pollo(the best rice with chicken) upstairs to Lucy. Mama Provi always took the stairs from the bottom of the complex to the top of the 8th floor, but along the way Mama Provi smelled delicious scents from people cooking and had to stop on each floor to ask if she could make a trade with her arroz con pollo for some of their wonderful smelling food. When she eventually arrived at Lucy’s…

    • 1296 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Bright rays of sunshine seep through the cracks of even the deepest buried secrets and illuminate the truth where it may not be desired. The light shatters any facade that coats an individual's suppressed secret. In Ann Beattie’s piece she repeatedly echoes the title, “Janus” — a Roman god depicted as having two faces. The notion of light and dark echoes back to the title as the contrast between them depicts a two-sided perspective. Through the repeated juxtaposition of light and dark, Ann Beattie conveys the theme that light reveals the truth while darkness preserves lies through Andrea’s symbolic bowl.…

    • 834 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    An outsider’s judgement should never negatively affect the behavior of a couple’s relationship. This idea is portrayed in two heartwarming short stories, “Poor Fish” and “The Tall Woman and Her Short Husband.” In the short story “Poor Fish” by Alberto Moravia, a man who has a low self-esteem meets a woman named Ida, who instills a lot of self-confidence and love in the man. Another couple, who symbolizes ‘perfection,’ spots…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Happily Ever Never In life, there are two different kinds of love stories, ones with blissful endings, and some with wretched endings. Not all stories can end with happy endings. Throughout history people have been searching for the love of loves. In “The Lady with the Dog” there is a glimpse of that love, and in “Chrysanthemums”, we see that love torn apart.…

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Diet Poem Analysis

    • 1127 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Carol Ann Duffy’s, The Diet, employs a variety of literary techniques to explore loss of identity, dieting, eating disorders and the ways in which these themes interconnect with feminism and femininity. The Diet is part of a collection of poems entitled the Feminine Gospels, the focus of which is showcasing the less desirable aspects of womanhood and providing social commentary on female issues, usually told from the perspective of a woman. The theme of change and transformation is also presented in this poem, connecting it to other poems in the collection such as The Woman Who Shopped which also incorporate change and transformation. In the opening stanza of the poem, the diet and character undertaking the diet are presented to the reader.…

    • 1127 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In today 's society, divorce is more the norm than ever before. With fifty percent of marriages ending in divorce, it is no surprise that we have become so familiar with the concept of divorce. Whether it be through personal experiences or through the works of literature, the idea of a marriages failing has become more known and sadly more accepting. In “A Temporary Matter”, author Jhumpa Lahiri delineates one woman 's desire to end her marriage while her husbands seems to do everything possible to save it. This idea of one sided love makes it evident to the readers that their marriage will inevitably come to an end.…

    • 1027 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her siblings experienced numerous events that led to the Walls’s family’s dysfunction. Many, if not all of the adversities the family faced were either caused by Rex or Rose Mary. The majority of events in the story that were problems had been caused by Rose Mary. Rose Mary is perhaps even more responsible for the dysfunction in the family’s home than is her alcoholic and abusive husband, Rex. Rose Mary was a mother and wife.…

    • 1022 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Love is surely a treasure everybody longs for. The subject of love is discussed in countless modern day films literature, and poetry. Many times the story ends with the man getting the girl of his dreams, or the woman finding her prince charming. There is no doubt that a fairy tale ending is what most people desire. Relationships are significantly more complicated than this.…

    • 1122 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays