Wartime Tragedy in Rural France: A Tale of Tires and Loss
Context
This story occurs in rural France at the time of the Second World War when the Germans occupied and dominated France. The setting is in the tire garage of Raoul’s family.
Title
From the title, we know that Raoul’s world is tires, and he compares everything to them from the very beginning.
Themes
- Guilt: We see the guilt that Raoul feels when he incorrectly repairs the tire of the Germans, indirectly causing the death of Cecile, the person he wants to protect the most.
- Determination/Pride for Your Work and Its Potential to Consume Lives: Raoul’s job makes a difference between life and death.
- Love/Human Relationships and the Danger of: Cecile clearly causes a distraction in Raoul’s work. This makes him incorrectly repair the tires that are the only thing that is good in his life. He is doomed; if he does something he doesn’t have to, he gets consequences (as he incorrectly repairs the German’s tire, he gets the consequence of losing Cecile).
- Rebellion Against Oppression (Resistance)/Price Paid for Freedom: Through Raoul’s act of rebellion, he kills what he wished to protect in the first place. This means that rebellion brings death.
- Death and Its Consequences
Narrative Viewpoint and Language Techniques
The narrator of this short story is Raoul, who is telling us a story that had already happened before. That’s why all that he says is a flashback. Also, he gives us a lot of foreshadowing, anticipating for the reader what is going to happen.
Raoul is self-conscious, and the reader is in Raoul’s mind; we feel what he feels. The tone of the narrator is always angry or sad. He is depressed, and all he says is related to death (tires = death). We can see a change of tone when Cecile dies because he doesn’t enjoy life anymore.
Important Quotes and Their Explanation
“Don’t ask me why.” – This shows how tires are important in Raoul’s life and that his life will be marked by tires.
“Life would go by us, and now and again stop. We were proud that M. Michelin was a Frenchman: for once we had invented something useful, instead of making a lot of noise about nothing. No, really, I am proud of our business.” – In the first sentence, it says that life from one day to another can go; he is foreshadowing Cecile’s death.
“I learnt to see a tire as sad, when its chin lay flat on the ground, melting away – and when it was fat and full it bounced, it was so happy.” – This is a personification of the tires. Raoul puts human characteristics, like being happy or sad, on the tires.
“The blessed Trinity, my father called it: the check, the double-check, and the Holy-Ghost-check. Who was a protestant through and through.” – The father is saying that he always has to check three times if the tires are well fixed. Everything has to be right because if not, it takes the man to his death.
“When old Mme Renouvin slid off the road in her little blue Peugeot, in 1938, and was found dead as a log in a wild rose bush, where she’d been thrown, and the report in the local paper blamed it on a ‘blow-out’, my poor father did not eat for days, like a fast of repentance.” – That blame is in the family. As the father didn’t eat for days because of guilt, Raoul didn’t fall in love anymore after the car accident. Cecile was in the resistance group (Petit Ours) and they are the ones that hate the Nazis and concentration camps. This is why Raoul’s father doesn’t want to be involved.
“For myself, though, it was the beginning of winter, not the end. I leave fresh flowers every year, on the anniversary.” – This is a metaphor that compares death, as winter is cold, sad, and kills flowers. Winter = death.
The Clod and the Pebble
This poem explores the nature of love through the views of an optimistic clod and a pessimistic pebble. To start, we have 3 stanzas with 4 verses in each one.
Analyzing the First Stanza
The selfless love, when you care and give yourself to the other, is when love means total delivery. If you don’t receive anything from the other side, you suffer a lot. That’s why we consider it pessimistic. It builds a heaven in hell’s despair because you build a heaven for the other but a hell for you (giving everything and not receiving anything from the other).
Analyzing the Third Stanza
The selfish love, when you receive all from the other side, but you don’t give anything back. You build a hell in heaven’s despite, a heaven for you but a hell for the other. The selfish love is optimistic for the one that is selfish and pessimistic for the selfless.
Analyzing the Second Stanza
This is the balance between the two other opposite stanzas. This stanza is the only one that doesn’t rhyme because it makes the separation so the reader can decide on their view. He is letting us decide one of the two types of lovers. Also, in this stanza, he makes a personification of a clod and a pebble.