Short Fiction · Chapter
Between the Living and the Dead explained
The narrator, a woman convalescing from illness, observes from her window a man and a child who are also confined by sickness.
What happens
The narrator, a woman convalescing from illness, observes from her window a man and a child who are also confined by sickness. The three form a silent kinship of the 'unburied dead,' watching life pass by. The man eventually commits suicide, while the child remains, isolated and dying from a congenital disease, a victim of inherited sin. The narrator grapples with the injustice of the child's suffering and the absence of divine justice.
Themes in this chapter
Suffering and Oppression
The chapter depicts the physical and emotional suffering of the three characters, especially the child's inherited disease and the man's despair leading to suicide.
Isolation and Alienation
The narrator, man, and child are isolated from the living world, described as 'unburied dead' looking out from 'coffin windows,' unable to connect with others.
Injustice and Social Critique
The narrator questions the existence of justice in the face of the child's undeserved suffering, invoking the biblical idea of visiting sins upon children.
Characters to notice
- Effie
The narrator, a woman recovering from illness, who observes the man and child from her window.
- The Old Shoemaker
The man who sits propped at his window, caresses a geranium, and ultimately commits suicide by jumping.
- Bella
The child with a congenital disease, isolated and dying, who nurses a wax doll and sits on the doorstep.
Key passages
“We were three—a man, a child, and I who am a woman. It was in the winter, and the man sat always at the front window of the third story opposite me, and the child in the parlor two stories below; and I from my second story saw them both.”
Three people—a man, a child, and the narrator—are each confined to their own rooms, watching each other and the world outside during winter.
Establishes the setting and the silent observation among the three characters.
“And the great hammer that beat in my head, the merciless hammer that rang like iron, began to clang: 'And the sins … of the fathers … shall be visited … upon the children … unto the third … and the fourth … generation …'”
The narrator's thoughts are haunted by the biblical idea that children suffer for the sins of their parents, repeated like a hammer blow.
Highlights the theme of inherited guilt and the narrator's internal torment.
“Of his will he went. It happened so: on a day of thunder and storm he leaned out and measured with his eyes for the last time; then he looked back into the room; no one was there. He set the geranium carefully at the side of the windowsill, and plunged to the stone below—the kind, hard stone that was merciful to him.”
The man deliberately chooses to end his life by jumping from his window during a storm, placing his geranium aside first.
Describes the man's suicide as a willful act, with the stone described as merciful.
“And there is no Justice anywhere , not anywhere .”
The narrator concludes that justice does not exist anywhere in the world.
Final statement of the chapter's critique of cosmic or divine justice.