White Angel

Michael Cunningham’s short story “White Angel” was published first in the New Yorker in 1987 and later as a chapter in his 1990 novel A Home at the End of the World. Cunningham has won several major literary awards, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Hours. “White Angel” is written in a realist style, poetic and at times humorous. The author uses symbolism to illustrate the narrator’s preoccupation with time, change, and grief, and to foreshadow the tragedy that befalls the family. The story has been frequently anthologized and was included in the annual Best American Short Stories collection in 1989. This guide uses the text as it appears in Best American Short Stories.

The story’s first-person narration conveys the interior, emotionally charged world of the protagonist. While the narration shifts between tenses—past, present, and future—and occasionally jumps through time, the story will end with the narrator confirming that he recounts the events years after their occurrence.

The story is narrated by Robert Morrow (Bobby) looking back on an important incident that happened when he was nine and his brother, Carlton, was 16.