Later, at the Bar

Later, at the Bar has a very different style compared to the rest of the books this semester.  To be honest, I feel it is a little watered down compared to the moral-rich story collections we saw before it.  The other books were filled with deep ideas like feminism, hope, and entrapment.  The stories in this collection really just seemed juvenile and redundant with a very repetitive form.  But I have spent a lot of time in my blogs this semester talking about the form of the story cycles we have read, and to be honest, I am getting tired of it.  So for the rest of this entry, I think I’m going to try to pull some symbols out of Rebecca Barry’s work instead.

 

First, I feel Lucy’s death is a cyclical symbol.  In the first story, Barry states that Lucy is originally from Alaska, where she experienced a lot of intense snowstorms.  Because of this she feels at home when it snows outside of the tavern.  When she walks outside on the night of her death, she looks like she’s “waiting for something wonderful to happen.”  To me, this is her way of returning to the snowy grounds from which she was born, thus completing a full circle.

 

The other symbol I picked up on was of the tavern itself.  I saw it primarily as a symbol of home.  As I have been writing this blog entry inside my warm house, I have noticed the weather outside as cold, damp, and depressing.  Just as the characters in Barry’s stories are comforted by the walls of the tavern, I am comforted by the walls of my home in troubling weather.  To me, it seems the tavern is a refuge for the characters from the physical weather as well as the weather of their lives and actions.