young woman's commentary on Roger mais Blackout
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Answer:
Blackout’ by Roger Mais is a short story that deals with the theme of conflict between two contradictory ideals of life– between class or colour discrimination and classless liberal ideal.
The story sets in a city on a West Indian island during the World War-II. At that time the American society was segregated with separate schools, buses and restaurants for the blacks and the whites races of people. In such a time an unnamed American woman went to a West Indian island where one night she was on the way to a bus stand. At the meantime a young man approached her and asked for a light, to lit his cigarette. This request caused some tension in her mind. Because she was a typical American woman with the consciousness of racism. She hesitated to give light to the black young man. Moreover, she had no matchbox with her. She was smoking but she had only lit one from the stub of the cigarette she had thrown away.
Eventually, she held out her cigarette towards him between two fingers. The young black man, bending his head, accepted the proffered light. He inhaled a deep lungful soothing smoke and exhaled again with satisfaction. He thanked her politely and when he was moving off he saw that instead of returning her the cigarette to her lips, she flicked it away. This behaviour of the young woman changed his polite gratitude to ‘cold speculation’.
This reference to the cigarette shapes the whole story. The attitude of the young American woman towards the black young West Indian man reveals her inner character, motives and attitude towards people.
The young man’s cold speculation and his contemptuous look towards the young American brought in some tension in the mind of the young woman. In a way, it unnerved her. Not that she was frightened. He seemed quite decent in his way and harmless, but he made her uncomfortable. Because his look was quite contemptuous. So she felt that if he said something rude she would have preferred it. It would have been no more than she would have expected of him.
Then he said to her that there was only men and women in the land. There was no class distinction. He remained standing there with the consciousness of male strength and pride that was justly his. There seemed something about him that was at once challenging and disturbing for the young woman standing at the same bus stand. His challenging attitude arose out of her sense of class equality which overcame the racist attitude of the young American woman and this gave him the power to shake the young woman’s feeling of class distinction.
Thus the reference to cigarette functions the structure of the whole story through which the story-teller brings about his theme into action successfully.
The theme of the story is no doubt single but very poignant and significant through which the story-teller presented two contradictory worlds.
Structurally the story is a successful one as the author has very artfully maintained the three unities as the unity of action, the unity of purpose and the unity of time.
In the use of dialogue in the story the author is very sparing and exact as the dialogues that he has employed to the mouth of his characters have revealed inner motives of the characters very successfully.