36 pages • 1 hour read
Mary HoodHow Far She Went
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.
Story 6: “Doing This, Saying That, to Applause”
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 6 Summary
The unnamed male protagonist in the sixth story is a fugitive and the villain of his own story. Woven within the third-person narration are snippets of comments from the characters in his life—their observations of a man unlikely to have done whatever he has done to bring about his demise.
The story begins with him hiding at home, looking at all the tokens of a life lived to others’ expectations—to applause. He leaves to get away from his horrific acts and is eventually caught. He hangs himself in his cell, leaving a note with only one word: “Dear” (82).
Story 6 Analysis
As the first story following the title piece, “Doing This, Saying That, to Applause” marks the shift from accepting the pretense of a life well-lived to acting out in ways that sabotage all things deserving of applause. The protagonist takes control of his own desperation by committing suicide. Both his life and his death represent loss—but loss that is self-inflicted as his only consolation. Instead of further querying how he got to this point and perhaps walking back his stance to find some resolution as earlier characters did, and instead of resigning himself to his new life (as the granny did in the title story) of fugitive and then prisoner, the male character rejects everything by killing himself though he shows agency in the end by taking his own life, suicide is also considered by society as “running away” from the issues at hand, or an extreme refusal to address the issues at hand.
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