Essay Questions

“The Cheapest Nights” winds up being a profoundly ironic title in what way?

One of the themes which is most pervasive throughout the short stories of this author is the cyclical nature of poverty. Tale after tale features characters trapped inside a system offering only the most extreme of possibilities for escape. Few stories make the point with such corrosive irony as this parable about a poor man buried so deep in the system he is actually blind to it. The “cheapest” part the night is his leisure activity of having sex with his wife which constantly results in new additions nine months later leading to his oblivious query “what pit in heaven or earth kept throwing them up” which becomes a metaphor for every question that is asked by those trapped in the cycle of poverty that seems painfully obvious to everyone else.

“The Journey” is an interior monologue that only gradually reveals the true horror of its events. What is going on in this story?

The story is conveyed through an accessible form of stream-of-consciousness that penetrates into the the mind of the narrator. Since he knows what is taking place, he doesn’t have to explain it. But what exactly is going on may not be clear to some readers, especially as it also takes on a much larger and more abstruse allegorical form of political commentary. At the same time, it can also be interpreted on a personal psychoanalytical level. The point of the story is not the same as what happens. Describing the events of the story is far easier than narrowing down the interpretation. What is actually happening is simple: a son is driving around with the dead body of his father in the car which is producing a stench of death that remains unsensed for him. The intimations of homosexual incest are certainly present in abundance, but as an example of how action should not be confuse with meaning is also made clear here: one could interpret the story just as easily as being about repressed sexual desire for the father on the part of the son as interpreting it as a son traumatized by rape at the hands of his father.

How does Idris convey the cyclical nature of experience through the mechanics of composition as well as story?

The author engages the tool of repetition to subtly imply that experience at the level of the lower classes is one of mind-numbing repetition and cyclical structure. The stories these tool tell are overwhelming constructed on that theme, but in a certain number of them the astute reader will notice that the beginning is replicated at the end. For instance, “The Treasure” begins with a coolly delivered just-the-facts description:

“Abdul Aal was a tall, dark-skinned plain-clothes policeman. On the back of his right hand he had an open-mouthed fish with a cleft tail and a spot on its eye.”

The final line of the story refers back to its opening line:

“Making his way slowly back to the crowds, he returns to being a tall, dark-skinned policeman, on the back of his right hand an open-mouthed fish with a cleft tail and a spot on its eye.”

In between, this short narrative offers an equally dispassionate just-the-facts account of how Abdul is accused of stealing one very important piece of evidence, confesses, receives his punishment and keeps his job. The potential for turning his entire life around with a blank check capable of earning him a cool hundred-thousand pounds speaks to the extremities required to break free from the bonds of the working class. The repetition implies that such opportunities are limited indeed. Several other stories are also constructed in ways in which the words used for opening and closing are either repeated verbatim or almost verbatim while others present opening imagery which is revisited at the end.