White Angel

Cunningham establishes the context for this story in the first paragraph, emphasizing the narrative importance of the era: “It was the sixties—our radios sang out love all day long. This of course is history. It happened before the city of Cleveland went broke, before its river caught fire” (1). This passage juxtaposes the optimism of 1960s music with the foreboding of ecological disaster; the narrator alludes to the Cleveland River Fire of 1969, when the surface of the river caught fire due to the water’s saturation with industrial waste. There is then the allusion to the city going “broke,” which happened in 1978 when the city defaulted on over $15 million in short-term loans from local banks. This was a landmark event since the Great Depression. As the story opens with these juxtapositions, Cunningham grounds the reader in the tumult of the 1960s. The music of love was only music, while the reality was ecological disaster and debt. This contrast develops the theme of generational conflict: The older characters have already faced many of life’s disappointments, and they are more conservative. They get jobs they don’t want, and they live responsibly at the cost of their dreams.