Analysis of 'Television' by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis is known for her experimental stories that are often quite compact. She experiments with form more than any other contemporary writer. 'Television' is a four-page exploration of what television does for people watching it and how television makes life better.

Imagery

In describing what is on TV, the narrator uses vivid imagery. There are zombies, a woman with a pearl necklace, a mother with bad teeth, a father with a broad smile. The images we see on television are so realistic that reality becomes secondary. Or perhaps reality is filtered through the medium of television, but it is always someone else's reality. The voyeurism of watching television is what makes it so appealing but this would not be possible without the realistic and vivid pictures that TV displays.

Unique Structure

'Television' is divided into three distinct sections that are roughly the same length. The first section focuses on the reasons why people watch television. There are many sentence long paragraphs. The second section is also choppy with several paragraphs separated by a single line. The third section contains four longer and connected paragraphs about the narrator's individual experience watching movies late at night. TV becomes an escape for the narrator away from her own life and into other more interesting lives. The many line breaks and transitions has the effect of giving the story a faster pace and it makes the story easy to read. I feel that the structure of the piece is a reflection of the narrator's internal dialogue.

Moral of the Story

After reading this story over a few times, I came to the conclusion that TV is quite helpful. TV seems like the perfect tool for escaping from your own life when it gets stressful and TV also provides entertainment. While the story never explicitly states that TV is good, it can be inferred from statements such as, "there is some real satisfaction in getting this information about the next day's weather" or "they say it will be exciting and it always is"

For a lonely person, television can be a godsend. Rather than waste away doing nothing, TV at least provides a way of killing time that is not entirely useless. For busy people, television is a welcome distraction from the stress and monotony of daily life. Television, when used responsibly, is an amazing tool. If you have been raised your entire life with television, it is incredibly difficult to imagine life without it.

Television is good. This was my takeaway from reading 'Television' by Lydia Davis.

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Lydia Davis - The Professor

Lydia Davis. The Professor. Analysis. Summary. If you came looking for anything related to these words, then you came to the right place. I have been really digging Lydia Davis recently. Been reading her story collections and some scholarly articles on her work. I started with Break it Down and I'm currently reading Almost no Memory, which contains the story I am writing about today.

Lydia Davis is more philosophically concerned than the average writer. Her stories don't really possess narrative as you would traditionally think of narrative. Instead her stories exist in the minds of her characters. There is some action but it clearly takes place in the form of memory, which is less exciting than action that takes place in reality, but I don't really mind. It's all the same to me and I actually enjoy many elements of Davis's writing style. She's a good writer and more importantly, she's a writer who does her own thing regardless of what anyone else thinks. The following is a summary and analysis of Davis's story "The Professor".

Summary

The narrator tells us that a few years ago she fantasized about marrying a cowboy. She admits that she lives on the East Coast and she is currently married to a someone who is not a cowboy. The idea of marrying a cowboy is appealing because it would stop the narrator from thinking so much. Feel free to take offense if you're a cowboy. The narrator says she got this idea from watching a movie with a friend which causes her to envision herself as a tough businesswoman who owns a motel. Around this time the narrator also met a student who was the closest thing to a cowboy that the narrator would ever find. She asks this guy out on a date and he says yes. On the date the man reveals a gun in his car and says that dangerous men are looking for him. The date goes well but the man says that he can never see the narrator again, which she understands.

The story ends with the narrator admitting that she thinks about marrying a cowboy much less often than she used to. She is so used to her husband that if she married a cowboy, it would essentially be a threesome.

Analysis

"The Professor" is classic Lydia Davis in that it presents a problem without an answer. The narrator is clearly longing for a great change. This longing takes the form of a cowboy fantasy. The fantasy merely occupies the narrator's thoughts while she does her job and lives the life that developed naturally for her.

It's interesting that the problem is never resolved. The narrator admits that she still thinks about marrying a cowboy today. This is par for the course with Davis's fiction. In a different story the narrator would end up actually meeting and marrying someone who fits her view of a cowboy and they would go off and live an idealized lifestyle. This is the traditional narratives of many stories in the romance genre. In Davis's world, she merely goes out on one date with someone who somewhat resembles a cowboy and that's that. It's a truncated and more realistic version of that much longer traditional narrative. Davis shows us that real life is often much different than what we read in fiction. This by itself is an old and cliche idea. Davis's stories may be fun to read although they seem to focus on the same ideological territory too frequently.

I am still pretty deep into the Lydia Davis rabbit hole so expect more posts on her work in the future. Thanks for reading.

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