On "The Pelican" by Edith Wharton (7614 words) *****

There's something about stories that are written in the first person about someone else that I seem drawn to. I think of The Great Gatsby, On the Road, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The latter seems less like the first two insofar as things actually seem to happen around Owen that affect the narrator; by contrast, the narrator in the first two pieces isn't really a large part of the story. He's a hanger-on, a person fascinated by the characters around him--and most especially one. (Brideshead Revisited has a similar dynamic, I'm now realizing.) Perhaps it's the narrator's fascination that works its magic on me: I too become interested in knowing more about this acquaintance or friend, as mystified as the narrator is. "The Pelican" works a similar form. Here, the narrator is a man who happens to fall in with a woman whose husband has died and who has a young child. She takes to the lecture circuit to make money. Unlike those other stories, however, here perhaps it is the narrator himself who is rather fascinating--this because he seems so much to detest the woman but still spends so much time writing about her, dropping in on her lectures, trying to avoid her, and so on. In short, he finds her lectures facile. But years go by, and every five to ten years he ends up running into her, each time, she's still at it, raising money to educate her son. At some of these drop-ins, she's wildly successful; at others, she's down on her luck. Such is fortune. But that son, well, she's been doing this a long while--and we begin to realize something more about the woman, that she's a con of sorts. And we begin to wonder also what exactly it is that draws her to lecturing, what makes her tick. Read the story here.