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<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Checking Out</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">“Checking Out” first appeared in
1986 in <i>Afterlives</i> and is collected in <i>Storeys from the Old
Hotel.</i></p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">SUMMARY: A nameless protagonist is
awoken by the slam of a door. He is lying on a blue satin coverlet
fully dressed in his best suit but without shoes. He believes
himself to be in a small, shiny, and cheap hotel room and sees his
suitcase nearby. He opens his bag and realizes his blue-eyed wife
Jane didn't pack it, thinking it must have been his cleaning woman,
Martha, before he remembers “Martha was dead.” He sees a picture
of Jane's clear blue eyes, and thinks that she would say that she
would miss him, “Though he knew the only time she really relaxed
was when he was gone – when he was gone, and she could pretend they
were rich for life, and there would never, never be a need to make
anything more, no need for late nights at the office, for flights to
New York with [his secretary] Jan.”</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">He remembers a flight and decides he is
in the Algonquin in New York, and wants to go out and get a magazine
but can't find his shoes: “Well, to hell with them.” He finds
Jan's picture while looking for his slippers, and thinks Martha must
have put it there. He tosses it “toward the wastebasket.” He
thinks she must love him “in a way Jane never had”, at least
since the birth of their child.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">He finds a picture of his adolescent
sweetheart Joan under Jan's picture, and hears the air conditioner
like an “unending sigh”. He recalls a childhood desk and is
astonished to think that Joan was probably a virgin then. He tries
to throw “both” pictures at the wastebasket again, and steps on
the balcony to see a huge atrium, with flooding below and the sky
above, but no way to leave the room. “Tiny figures moved slowly
across the lobby, wading in water nearly waist deep …. The room was
dark and gloomy behind him, like a cave in which something slept.”
He returns to the room to see Jan's picture once again on his clean
clothes, and reaches for the phone to confess to Jane.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The story cuts to Jane and Mrs. Clem
discussing how nice he looked in all that pretty blue at his funeral
– Jane bought an air tight dome to keep water from getting to her
dead husband. She answers the phone but hears nothing, not even
breathing, as the main character, despite his resolve to return to
his wife Jane, becomes confused again and calls out all three names
before the cleaning woman comes in to turn down the bed so that it is
ready for him to lie in once more.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">COMMENTARY: The first thing that jumps
out is the style of the story, rather unusual for Wolfe at this point
in his career: simple declarative sentences that repeat the same
pattern over and over. The simple repetition will be the narrator's
fate. He tosses Jan's picture toward the wastebasket three times, and
many thoughts recur incessantly. “No doubt” starts at least seven
sentences in a fairly short story – but our main character has been
plagued by doubts and uncertainty all his life, especially when it
comes to women. The fragments that stick out are “Flights …
Space. … an atrium - … a flood - ...” Even the names of the
women involved (Jan, Jane, and Joan) have a sameness to them that
makes them seem like a repetitive part of a cycle, and no doubt this
symbolizes his difficulty in separating his feelings for them while
he was alive. He tries to get rid of unwanted pictures now with
little success. The picture of Jan keeps cropping up, in the frame
and on his clothes, whenever his attention waivers – no matter how
he resolves to throw it away, he fails.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The overwhelming blue of the sky and
the water in the atrium and his own coverlet of course reflect the
blue of his coffin – but he is trapped in that small room, sealed
off from the blue water and infinite sky he can only glimpse from the
closed balcony. More than this, however, the blue also represent
Jane and her blue eyes. At the end of the story, she has erected an
air tight barrier around him so that the water can't reach him, the
blue theme her choice, and he has been sealed off from her love. His
ending decision, to return to Jane, comes too late – unable to
truly make up his mind in life, in death the decision has no power,
and he is trapped in the limbo, with only the repetitive sameness of
trying to throw away the things he never could in life.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The sighing might seem like the slow
exhalation of a final breath, but it probably implies regret now that
things can no longer be fixed and he has finally made his choice.
Even with his resolution, which seems firm, when Jan does not hear
him, he immediately begins to call out the wrong name once more.
This final scene is the hardest to pin down as “after-life” or
not. It is doubtful there is any intersection between his existence
in the hotel limbo and Jan's continuing life without him, but whether
or not his spirit can actually succeed in making the call, it is
clear he can no longer communicate with her. The only female
presence he will have here is probably “dead” Martha the cleaning
woman, who refuses to do windows. His failure to see clearly in life
and appreciate the things he had has doomed him to this.
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">With the meaning of the female names
discussed below, Mrs. Clem's minor mercies involve saying how nice he
looked in death and in suggesting to Jan that she hang up the phone,
but all that is left for the main character is the bitterness of
separation and the return of his dead cleaning woman.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">There is some speculation as to whether
this afterlife is more like a hell or a purgatory, but from the
sighing and the main character's exclamation, “To hell with them”,
it seems to be more like the first circle of Dante's Hell, Limbo, the
start of the huge vertical prison, rather than any Catholic idea of
Purgatory, for even when he makes his decision to return to Jane or
throw away Jan and Joan, immediately they are back to haunt him.
There is no indication that he can ever throw them away, failing to
do so in life – when Jane does not hear his voice, the cycle of
confusion starts over.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">LITERARY ALLUSIONS-</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Because of the name, “Checking Out”,
and the sighing that is heard throughout the story, the thought that
this was something like Wolfe’s version of Bierce's “Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge” presented itself, but the blue satin coverlet
and the dead man's shoeless state matches a bit too much with the
coffin (most are buried without shoes, after all) that his wife has
spent so much money on to believe that he was actually still in the
process of “checking out”. It seems far more likely that the
literary allusion at work is to Dante's <i>Inferno</i>, where the
souls in Limbo constantly sigh, lamenting their separation from God.
Even though Dante's vision of purgatory is also vertical, like the
huge atrium that our narrator sees, the sighing found throughout
Limbo and even the idea of Virgil in Limbo as a fountain and the “sea
of all good sense” makes it seem as if our main character is more
closely situated to the Inferno than Purgatory. Our nameless main
character has no way to ascend or leave the hotel room, even though
he insists on checking out of it.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">NAMES</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Obviously, all three female names are
so similar in their root that they mean the same thing.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Jan – God is gracious, it can also
mean gift from God</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Jane – God is gracious, gift from
God</p>
<div style="margin-bottom:0in">Joan- God is gracious, gift from God</div><div style="margin-bottom:0in">One gets the impression that part of the narrator's failing in life was in lacking appreciation for God's gifts until it was too late.</div>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Bruce – implies thick brush (if there
is a deliberate Dante reference at work in this story, ironic that
the start of his poem involves getting lost in the woods -</p>
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<p>I<font>N</font> the midway of this our mortal life,</p>
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<p>I found me in a gloomy wood, astray</p>
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<p>Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell,</p>
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<p>It were no easy task, how savage wild</p>
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<p>That forest, how robust and rough its growth,</p>
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<p>Which to remember only, my dismay</p>
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<p>Renews, in bitterness not far from death.</p>
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<p style="margin-bottom:0in"><br>
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Martha – the sister of Lazarus and
Mary, her name means bitter, (just as the names of the wife of the
narrator in “Redbeard” and the daughter in “The Adopted Father”
do).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">Mrs. Clem – the name Clem implies
merciful. Her mercy extends to advising Jane to hang up and in
admitting that the dead man looked nice in all that “pretty blue”.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">THE EFFECT OF THE NARRATIVE VOICE:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">The immediacy of first person might
create a more personal look at our narrator’s dying or dead
experiences, but the third person allows distance and a passive
powerlessness that suits the isolated, trapped man – he is about to
lose the “I” of ego, isolated in the watery hotel room of his
spirit. His attempt to assure his wife that he is returning and that
he is making his choice comes far too late.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:<br>What is the
significance of the flood, and why would Jane erect an air tight
barrier around his coffin to avoid the entrance of water?
Symbolically I think this represents the separation from her, but is
the water imagery truly as benign as Jane's blue eyes when there are
figures in the lobby wading in water up to their waists?</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:</p>
<p style="margin-bottom:0in">I feel as if Wolfe has done several
stories where the narrator is about to die, namely “The Recording”
and “Melting”, and several that involve consciousness after death
- “The Dead Man”, <i>Peace, </i>and some of the stories from
<i>Strange Travelers</i>. However, even though there are some small
gestures that this one is located on the cusp of dying, the overall
effect is that of an after-life story where our narrator deals with
the regrets and mistakes of his life, and in that regard it is
closest to <i>Peace</i>. It is also like a more figurative
“Packerhaus Method”, though this one is more overtly dualist,
with the intersection between the afterlife and the purely physical
world fleeting, ineffectual, and perhaps illusory.</p>
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