A Late Encounter with the Enemy

“General Sash was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college.”

This quote introduces the two protagonists and establishes the General’s death as a key point of tension in the story. The seriousness of Sally’s devout gesture—praying every night on her knees—belies the petty vanity of her motivations. She does not want General Sash to live because she cares for him but instead because she wants to use him as symbol of her values at her graduation.

“He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn’t have any use for processions, and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking.”

The contrast of parades and processions in this quotation contrasts contemporary America with Sally’s graduation. While contemporary America is superficial and commercial—personified by the beauty queens sponsored by commercial products—the procession concerns schoolteachers. Schoolteachers are associated with the process of educating the future generation, an inevitability that makes the General uncomfortable. A history class may present the past with greater context than the General has the capability of understanding in his old age, something that makes him favor the past that he cannot quite remember in full. Further, this quotation foreshadows the General’s death at the graduation—the River Styx was crossed to enter the underworld in Greek mythology.