28 pages • 56 minutes read
Amy HempelIn the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Masks
In the story, masks are both literal and metaphoric. Literally, a mask helps preserve the friend’s health, keeping invasive germs away from her fragile immune system. A downside of wearing a mask, however, is that, by covering the mouth and muffling sounds, it impedes communication. Metaphorically, a mask obscures emotions and feelings.
The narrator notices that her friend, the hospital patient, appears comfortable wearing it. She calls her “a pro” (2). The narrator chafes at its unnaturalness. Here the mask could be a metaphor for the acceptance of death. The friend has had more time to become accustomed to the idea, and the narrator notes her ease but rebels, refusing to accept it. The narrator also associates the mask with robbers and thieves; the questionable morality of these figures hints at the narrator’s sense of guilt, but the metaphor could also signify that she recognizes her friend’s diagnosis as a theft, an unfair confiscation of her health and life.
Hands
Images of hands appear in several places in the story. Hands can be healing, like the nurses who comfort the scared friend by “rubb[ing] her back in slow circles” (9). Hands communicate fear and anger, as exemplified by the incidents where the patient readjusts her wig, revealing that her disease and medical treatment has rendered her bald (10), or where she wordlessly “yanked off her mask and threw it on the floor” (9), and the instance when the narrator “twisted [her] hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain” (8). Moreover, hands speak a language understood by few, as emphasized by the chimp who, with her “talking hands” (10), has words that can articulate her grief but that are inadequate to fully communicate her despair. The story closes on this image, drawing a parallel with the narrator.
Earthquakes
An earthquake is an unexpected event that one can rationally prepare for but cannot predict. The two women have previously lived through an earthquake as college roommates. The friend’s diagnosis is another type of earthquake, an event that appears with no warning and shakes up both lives. The fact that both characters have previously survived one offers the reader hope for the friend’s survival, her cure from her disease; however, earthquakes sometimes impact a few and leave others alone, just as the disease that has ravaged the friend has spared the narrator.
The narrator’s obsession with and fear of earthquakes is a metaphor for her fear of anything that is unpredictable or cannot be controlled, such as the friend’s disease that has come with no warning and will strike her down in the prime of her life. Likewise, earthquakes are potentially fatal, just like the illness; the narrator’s fear of death is central to her character.
Flying
The theme of flight serves several purposes in the story. Flying is a vehicle of mobility and freedom; it is also a means of escape. In addition, flight is a metaphysical conceit—an extended metaphor—and another term for death: When a soul departs from a body, it is said to “take flight.”
The narrator has a debilitating fear of flying. This fear has delayed her visit to her terminally ill friend. Her fear also provides a contrast between the narrator and her friend, because the friend does not share this fear, able to enjoy flying by continuing normal activities like eating. The narrator recognizes there are far more dangerous things to be concerned about, concluding, “What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence” (4). Ironically, the narrator and her friend have always survived their flights—a seeming danger that is not dangerous—but the friend will not survive the unseen danger of the invisible disease within her.
