Ecstasy to the Deepest Grief in Polly Clark's Short Story, Elephant

Elephant

Imagine a world without dreams; would it not be empty and meaningless? Have you ever wondered how your life in the end will turn out to be? Have you at any time really taken control of you own life or do you simply not care? No one can live without dreams and aspirations, goals to reach. You have to strive for something in life; otherwise your life is at risk of becoming monotonous and uneventful. Having no dreams tends to isolate you. It is not unlike living in a box, an empty box, where everything feels the same. William, the main character in “Elephant”, deals with this problem every day.

The Author, Polly Clark, is a Canadian writer renowned for her poetry. Her writing scrutinizes all facets of the human experience, ranging from the highest ecstasy to the deepest grief. In the short story “Elephant”, which was published in 2006, the author explores the depths of the human mind.

The story starts in medias res, we just jump straight into the thick of things without much information and, furthermore, it is written in the past tense utilizing a third person narrator that follows the thoughts and feelings of William, who is the main character, closely. Overall the story has a chronological structure, however there is one flashback. The narrator often directly describes actions, such as “William wrote biographies of pop singers” (page 2, line 19). By way of this sentence, the reader is informed of the main character’s profession, and later finds out that William would have rather preferred to write about male film stars from the golden age instead. The narrator also tells the story in such a way that invokes feelings of empathy towards William due to his many problems.

William has a flashback of a childhood incident...

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... takes to write: “When you had the material stacked up, right there beside you, a pile of notes and facts, there was absolutely no reason for being unable to proceed with the next step.” Eventually though, he quits his writing career, which was based on these principles because it made him unhappy, and this, perhaps, can be interpreted as Clark’s commentary on her own job as an author, a cautionary tale of sorts, teaching that writing ought to always be based on creativity and inspiration and not the mere mechanical stroke of a pen, much like we as individuals need creativity and inspiration in our lives if we are to be truly content. In short, to produce his best work, an author, of both life and works of literature, needs to fuel his creation by his own honest feelings and experiences and fill the blank pages with all the ‘blue elephants’ he can possibly muster.