Letters from the Samantha"

Mark Helprin, in the short story "Letters from the Samantha," presents the monkey as a symbol of the dark and powerful forces of nature which both terrify and tempt the sailors. The key to the understanding of the story and the role of the monkey is found before the animal even appears. The writer of the letters which comprise the story is the captain of the ship, the Samantha. Fascinated and frightened, Samson Low is watching, with his men, the progress of a typhoon approaching the ship:

We were afraid, though every man on deck wanted to see it, to feel it, perhaps to ride its thick swirling waters a hundred times higher than our mast. . . . I confess that i have wished to be completely taken up by such a thing, to be lifted into the clouds, arms and legs pinned in the stream (272).

The narrator/captain goes on to equate this imagined surrender to a typhoon to the sailor's relationship with the marine environment in general. He says the "phosphorescent seas

. . . are dangerously magnetic even for hardened masters of good ships," and concludes: "I have wanted to surrender to plum-colored seas, to know what one might find there naked and alone. But I have not, and will not" (272).

Then, in the wake of the typhoon, the monkey is discovered in a "clump of tangled vegetation." He brings the monkey on board "on impulse." There are immediate hints of the dark consequences which would ultimately follow such an impulsive act. as he reaches to pull the monkey on board, the capta

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forgiven for believing otherwise. The monkey is indeed a symbol---of nature, of the unknown, of death, of the death wish of human beings which draws them---sailor or not---to stare into the darkness of destruction, or self-destruction, and, sometimes, to leap into that darkness to experience it first-hand. Work Cited Helprin, Mark. "Letters from the Samantha." American Short Story Masterpieces. Ed: Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks. New York: Laurel, 1989. 271-282. David Quammen, in the short story "Walking Out," tells the coming-of-age tale of an eleven-year-old boy, David. The message with respect to that coming-of-age for david, and the accompanying establishment of his own individual identity, is that he must cast off the shadows of both his father and his mother. The story is specifically about his learning to separate himself from his father and his father's powerful influence, but in that extraordinarily painful process David also comes to see that his mother's influence as just as dangerous to his identity as his father's. We see David at the beginning of the story as a young boy who is doing everything he is told to do by his parents. He is caught in the middle of their struggle, though they apparently divorce some ti

Category: Literature - L