Ali Smith Autumn Sparknotes

A sandy beautiful beach; the first thing we see in Autumn, by Ali Smith. A text that some readers may see as a sweet story of how a young girl, Elisabeth Demand, and an older man, Daniel Gluck became best friends. Other readers will see how this polynomic story is also a struggling tale of Elisabeth grasping for freedom, but she isn’t the only who loses her freedom at times. Autumn begins in the consciousness of Mr. Gluck himself. He’s aged quite a bit since first meeting Elisabeth and is now on the verge of dying. Constantly tired and sleeping, Mr. Gluck seems to do most of his thinking now in his dreams, trapped and waiting for death; part of the time wondering if he might already be dead. “Daniel Gluck, your luck’s run out” he hears on this

Gluck. Going off of what Elisabeth has told us so far, they aren’t the friendliest with their neighbors. In fact, she tells us the main way they know their neighbors exist is from the sounds of their tv’s coming through the walls; everyone tends to keep to themselves. When Elisabeth is 8, she tells us of a school project to chat with neighbors on “what it means to be a neighbor” (page 43). Even after telling her in advance, Elisabeth’s mother does not want to accompany Elisabeth to interview the neighbor; Ms. Demand even goes as far to encourage Elisabeth to lie on the project. This way Ms. Demand could continue to be lazy, and would not need the trouble of interviewing her neighbor. Ms. Demand’s laziness and negligence towards her daughter’s school work is in a way Elisabeth’s first encounter with her freedom being taken away from her. Obviously not willing to budge, Ms. Demand proceeds to bribe her daughter and ends up convincing her to da as

The post office is full of small signs of oppression; these aren’t solely focused on Elisabeth either. To start off, the lines themselves seem to be structured in a way that make the process as slow as possible. The line moved so slowly that when Elisabeth left the post office to go grab a book, when she came back the same two people were being helped at the counter. While waiting in this long line seemingly made to keep them from arriving at their destination, she has time to read a decent bit. Brave New World, the book which Elisabeth reads whilst waiting, is a symbol of control itself. In it pages lies a story of a futuristic strictly run society in which people have very little freedom of choice. Ironically, she enjoys the book and encourages the post office worker to install a library into the building. From there Elisabeth encounters the next barrier- the post office workers themselves. Sadly, Elisabeth must encounter these people twice. Using this service to send in a passport for officiating is supposed to be faster, but the workers themselves seem to not want anyone to be able to travel. Several times, on both of Elisabeth’s trips to the post office, she is asked “where do you plan on traveling.” Normally this could be seen as a typical question, but every time whenever Elisabeth replied saying she didn’t have any specific plans, her answer didn’t