Understanding the story

1. What is this story about?

2. Did "keeping busy" help him to forget?

3. Who ended the relationship and how long ago?

4. Did the relationship break up quickly or over a period of time? Give reasons for your opinion.

5. Which special thing about the woman - apart from her prominent backbone – does the man remember best and miss most?

6. The man still has his dog. But even the dog is little comfort to him. Why?

7. In what way is the dog happier than the man?

8. What examples does the author give to show that the man hopes that the women will come back to him? Do you think his hopes are justified or not?

9. In what way is the town haunted?

10. How much is twenty pounds? What does this loss of weight tell you about the man's condition?

11. "He knew he was dying." Does the author expect us to take this comment seriously? Give reasons for your opinion.

12. Why does the dog hesitate to jump out of the car?

13. Why does the lone fisherman suddenly become so important to the man?

14. Hope is often stronger than reason. Can you find any evidence for this in the last paragraph of the story?

Give a brief summary (written or oral) of the story in your own words.

Style and language

1. Pick out any words which suggest that the author may either be American or writing mainly for an American audience.

2. Find the point in the story where the tense changes from the past to the present. What difference does this make to the way the story is told?

3. Is there any irony (intended or not) in the hero's choice of the name Terminator for his new car?

Points for discussion

1. Discuss the role played by the weather - and similes involving the weather in this story.

2. In what ways does the man torture himself? Would you do the same in his position?

3. The narrator says that the hero of the story is "not superstitious". Do you agree or disagree? Give your reasons.

4. The man only talks twice in the story - apart from in flashbacks. Who to, how does this emphasize his position?

5. We know nothing about the real reasons why the couple has split up. Whom do you sympathize with and why?

6. "Marriages have one advantage over living together: they are more difficult to terminate." Do you agree with this statement? Do you think the couple were married? Would it have made any difference to the break-up if they been?

7. How old do you think the man is? Does age make a difference is cases this?

8. Is there any hope for the man, or is this a purely pessimistic story?

9. Are you superstitious? Do you do any of the things described in the story-or anything else - in the hope that it will bring you luck?

10. "What else is there to do?" Do you think that the author has an answer to this question? Do you have one?

11. Give a full stylistic analysis of the text.

Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born in 1904 in Berkhamsted near London. A writer of novels and short stories, he was more concerned with moral issues and spiri-tual conflicts than most of his contemporaries. The world in which his charac-ters live is a shabby, fallen one where evil reigns, whether he is describing the Brighton of the 1930s or the French-occupied Vietnam of the 1950s. Greene became a Roman Catholic while working as a young reporter in Nottingham in 1926, but always insisted that he was a Catholic who wrote novels rather than a Catholic novelist. His writing technique is much influenced by the tech-niques of film-making, and indeed one of his most famous novels, The Third Man, began life as a film made in Vienna in 1946, not as a book. Greene died in 1992.