The Lamp at Noon

Paul, Ellen’s husband, is a 30-year-old farmer who is fiercely loyal to his land, which he views as inextricable from his dream of becoming a self-made and financially stable man. Paul is deeply embedded in his vision of the future. He is prone to slipping into illusions in an effort to flee from Ellen’s arguments, which highlight the reality of their situation.

Paul, in his mind, is locked into a relationship with the land. As the land has repeatedly betrayed him, he has pitted his own will against nature. This determination manifests in Paul’s physical appearance, though the story interprets his appearance somewhat differently. Ellen views Paul’s transformation in the context of their circumstances: “the strength, the grimness, the young Paul growing old and hard, buckled against a desert even grimmer than his will” (2). The narrator finds somewhat more of a balance. While the narrator acknowledges that “[b]eneath the whip of sand his youth had been effaced,” Paul’s hardness is described instead as a “harsh and clenched virility that yet became him, […] fulfillment of his inmost and essential nature” (4).

Paul’s stoic resolve is both noble and tragic, inspirational and foolish. His intractability is his source of strength and his undoing—or, at the very least, a choice he makes at great cost. Paul’s greatest efforts at empathy reveal concern for Ellen. Yet even when faced with the undeniable obliteration of his fields, he thinks first about how to defend them against Ellen, rather than vice versa. Paul is more committed to his dream, in which Ellen plays a role, than to the real and present-day Ellen.

Paul’s commitment to his dream seems unlikely to yield. However, the ending suggests that nature will ultimately consume even him. When Paul finds Ellen and their baby, the child already dead, he is unable to communicate with her. Paul is “transfixed,” able only to gingerly touch their child’s dust-caked face. He carries his wife, dead child in her arms, “heedless of her weight” while walking “with a long dull stride” (14). His resolution is absolute. Ultimately, however, he will achieve a Pyrrhic victory at best; he has little else to lose.

Paul and Ellen’s son, an infant boy, is a child of unspecified age. His name is never revealed. The presence of the child serves to heighten Ellen’s sense of responsibility and imprisonment her within her hopeless situation. The environmental danger of the dust storm has made taking care of a baby an untenable proposition. It is impossible for Ellen to keep the baby safe and comfortable due to the insidious effects of the storm. The fragility of infant’s life is mirrored in the vulnerability that Paul and Ellen also face. The unnamed child is too young to speak, but he does function as a catalyst for conflict between the two adult characters in the story.

Ellen feels desperate to leave the farm in order to provide stability and safety for her son, while Paul wants to remain on the farm in order to be a role model of independence and hard work. Ellen wants to provide immediate safety for her son while Paul wants to provide a legacy for the boy. Their conflicting goals create an emotional rift between the two main characters and a sense of urgency and emotional tension.

Much like the lamps that the two main characters light in the middle of the day, the infant serves as a symbol of a dream or faith in a better future. However, in the same way that a lamp can be easily snuffed out, the child dies at the end of the story. The exact nature of the child’s death is unclear. Perhaps it was exposure to the storm. Perhaps Ellen smothered the child in her efforts to protect him. Perhaps the child died earlier, and Paul did indeed hear a woman cry out. It is ultimately irrelevant; the child is dead, another terrible blow or betrayal to Paul’s dream. This death emphasizes the depth of the cost of clinging so steadfastly to an arguably impossible vision of the future.