# Between the Living and the Dead explained — Short Fiction > Chapter companion for Short Fiction by Voltairine de Cleyre. ## 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. ## Character check-ins ### 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 lines > 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._ ## Links - HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/short_fiction_55_se/chapters/between-the-living-and-the-dead - Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/short_fiction_55_se - All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/short_fiction_55_se/chapters