Anita Desai Short Story Summary

CIRCUS CAT, ALLEY CAT

this short story is written by an author named Anita Desai. It’s about the life of a woman who has been a circus performer but is now a nanny. The theme this story focuses on is a woman’s place in society and the woman’s role at home. I will in the analysis of this story show you that through the characterization of Anna and the narrative technique that this author has chosen to use.

Anna’s physically gets describes as large and heavily built woman with black bright eyes and black hair.

Anna is a Malabar girl. She was born into a circus and she had been training cats, like lions and tigers, since she was thirteen years old. She then became a circus performer.

She married a boy later on who was also working in the

That is because we only get access to one person’s perspective and one person’s thoughts and feelings. Also we only know what the narrator knows and it is only one person observing the events that occur. But this narrator also speaks on the behalf of other characters in the story, as an ‘’we.’’

Which takes us back to the use of imagery in the text. As mentioned earlier, the children in Mrs. Bates house have quite the imagination. That is already clear to us in the beginning of the text, when Anna calls in the children. The narrator imagines himself being in a cage, like a lion or a tiger, and he sees Anna in a circus outfit with a whip in her hand.

After that, he figures out that she had been a circus performer and it sparks his and the other children’s imagination. When she rattled the doors or windows, they imagined her locking them into their cages. At some point when they are eating breakfast and Anna is cutting a slice of bread, they imagine it being ‘’a great hunk of fresh meat, dripping with scarlet blood.’’ And the cooking spoon in her hand became, in their imagination, a whip instead. Also they imagine her outfit changing to her circus performing