Say Yes by Tobias Wolff

Mads Bern Madsen 3.e

Say yes.

Love is one of the most powerful feelings in the world, but is there a such thing as interracial love? That question is the focal point in Tobias Wolff’s short story Say Yes, where a husband and his wife agues about mixed race marriages over a sink of dirty dishes.

The short story starts off directly, in media res, displaying a scene with the two spouses doing the dishes during an evening in their home. The intrigue is set when the two spouses gets in on the subject of whether white people should marry black people or not. The tension rises as the wife, Ann, believes skin color should not matter if two people are in love. Her husband argues that whites and blacks come from way different backgrounds and cultures, therefore mixed marriages are doomed to fail. The rise of tension is shown with expressions like: “he snapped, angry with her^[1]” (P.3 L.13), or “Oh boy” (P.2 L.44). This leads to a conflict.
The short story by Tobias Wolff is written with a third-person narrator, using the husband’s perspective. This means that the storyteller/narrator is an outsider to the short story, but has insight into the unfolding events through the husband’s point of view. The narrator knows what the husband thinks and feels, for example the narrator knows: “He felt ashamed that he had let his wife get him into a fight. In another thirty years or so they would both be dead. What would all that stuff matter then?” (P.5 L.12) However, the same cannot be said for his wife, Ann. The narrator doesn’t know what the female character thinks and feels, but relies on what her husband observes and knows about her: “She was demonstrating her indifference to him, and it had the effects he knew she wanted it to have” (P.4 L.45)

But even though the storyteller/narrator is limited to the husband’s point of view, there is nothing in the short story that suggests the narrator agrees with this viewpoint. Through the short story, the narrator stays detached and objective, letting the two spouses speak for themselves. By doing that, the readers can form their own image of the two characters.

The short story is very visual. Their conflict takes places during the night, while they are cleaning the diches, this creates imagery helping us picture the two spouses doing the dishes.

By imagery the readers understand all sensory images and visuals. For instance, the way the husband views his wife when she is upset helps the readers imagine her face as she “pinched her brows together and bit her lower lip and stared down at something” (P.2 L.16). The readers experience sensory details as well, for example when Ann turns the pages in the magazine “slowly” (P.4 L.45) or when the dogs outside are “growling” (P.5 L.22)

Imagery and senses helps the readers to understand the atmosphere in the short story much better. Another thing that provides an extra layer to the short story are symbols. Much of the symbols in this short story is related to shades and colors. For example, the “black people” and “white people” (P.2 L.11). Also the silverware, the way “(…) the metal darkened to pale blue, then turned to silver” (P.4 L.9) These examples are all symbols for the contrast between the different ideas the two characters have on interracial marriages. The two dogs outside are another symbolic element in the short story. A female and a male dog, representing the husband and the wife, reproducing their fight at the animal level: “One of them was rolling around on his back and the other had something in her mouth. Growling, she tossed it into the air (…)” (P.5 L.21)