My First Goose Literary Analysis

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Recommended: Russia in the early 20th century

Russian literature of the early 20th century was dense with allusions and responses to the political situation of the time. Authors often used their work as means to support, praise, or less commonly, criticize the revolution and the new socialist government. Not all Russian literature of the time was written in order to make a political statement, but many novels and texts certainly featured narratives that mirrored the revolutionary time period. Due to the censorship of the socialist government, very few works were critical of the government, for risk of being arrested or even executed for treason. There were however, authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Isaac Babel, who did not agree with or approve of the revolution and made it known in …show more content…

In the story My First Goose the narrator, who is a soldier, uses a Jewish family to take out his anger about not being accepted within his division. The soldier’s commander calls him “one of those little powder puffs” (Babel 231), and mocks his education and the spectacles he is wearing. After a comrade throws his suitcase out in to the street, he snaps and lashes out at the Jewish family that is housing the division. Crushing the neck of what is probably the family’s last possession, a goose, the narrator skewers it with his sword and demands the old woman of the house to cook it for him. It is the narrator’s way of showing dominance over common citizens, and in fact this violence earns him more respect the other men in his division. However, he narrator feels great remorse for his actions. This violence carried out by the Cossacks is a common theme throughout all of the stories in Red Cavalry, which creates a struggle for the narrator. He is attracted to the world of the Cossacks, but at the same time cannot reconcile himself to the violence and brutality of warfare. Red Cavalry is a sort of semi-fictional documentation (the narrator shows great resemblance to Babel himself) of the narrator’s struggle to find identity, meaning, and acceptance in the socialist, oppressive world that is early 20th century

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