The setting of Alice McDermott’s “These Short, Dark Days” are crucial to the understanding of how desperate measures need to be taken at times. For those who are like Sister St. Savior, our end goal to help out people for own self-fulfillment. However, we find ourselves puzzled when there are structural rules set in place to follow that forces the nun ironically named Sister St. Savior to find a loophole. It is very important to know that it is the turn of the century Brooklyn, and the institutional Catholic Church is starting to fall apart. Sister St. Savior is to abide by God and the Church’s rules but seems to contradict her duties in order to find resolve the situation she just so happens to be placed in. Sister St. Savior knowingly decides acts be defiant and becomes hypocritical by bending the rules made in place by the church. The central themes that is detected…show more content… The paragraph where he eventually dies, suggest that he possesses juvenile attitudes towards his mother that he hasn’t been able to cope with rationally. “He remembered his mother, the picture book spread out on her wide lap.” (McDermott, pg. 2) The time leading up to the suicide, he clearly has been defiant in the same vein as a child. He had financial, anger and alcohol issues coupled up with him not going to his job at the B.R.T. which where he ends up unemployed. Jim didn’t even take his wife and future child’s needs of his own which the readers can interpret as being selfish. So Annie’s role in the story is trying to pick up the broken pieces left behind.
Sister St. Savior, who is in her sixties and has been at her job as a nun for many years, is walking back to the Convent on a dark day in February, which is the peak of winter weather. The author states as she is walking her “bladder is full” and “ankles are swollen” (McDermott, pg. 2) but despite this, she turns her attention to what comes to find out a house looks to be catching fire. The reader can
