Expectations

At first glance, the narrator of “How” and the protagonist of “A Wall of Fire Rising” seem like two different people leading disparate lives. The Woman is a modern day female living in New York City while Guy is man who leads a more primitive lifestyle in a rural community. A closer look into the characters reveals that both

are suffocated by the lives and roles they are forced to live and yearn only to be freed of the challenges they face within themselves. Woman’s and Guy’s paths meet directly, however, on the road to escapism, and both similarly end in a destination of ruin and tragedy.

Guy leads a routine life by most standards. He comes home where an eager son and “nightly peck on the cheek” from his wife await him. He looks forward to immediately eating supper with his family, because it is a “thing that [they have] on [their] minds.” Responsible for the welfare of his family, the night they eat supper is fulfilling on the surface, as the family relieves themselves of hunger. After his son recites lines about a revolution, Guy relates to the moment “with a strange feeling that [he cannot] explain.” After saying his table prayer, Guy has to “keep tears from rolling down his face.”

At night, Guy escapes his thoughts through his reassurance that the family has put “their hunger vermin to sleep.” Still, the reader gets the sense that Guy is experiencing a revolution of his own in his mind, and that his hunger has not been satisfied. “Guy let[s] go of the hands of both his wife and boy” and runs to the field where an air balloon rests. It is in that moment that he has let the “longing” take over him, and his wife makes a quick notice of it. She notes that Guy has “a flame in his eyes brighter than [a] lighter’s.”

The narrator of “How” leads a routine life, as well. She lives with a man who, at one point has made her “feel discovered, comforted, needed, [and] loved.” At night, she makes love to him and still occasionally experiences waves of sentimentality and devotion towards him. Still, a “virus of discontent” plagues her and leaves her with a distinct feeling of “restlessness.” At night, she “escape[s] into books.”

The stories each have an element of symbolism within them. Guy has placed his dreams into the hot air balloon that he hopes to take off in one day. The narrator of “How” is absorbed in books and dreams of having affairs with actors, and leading a life reflective of that of an opera. Guy wants to fly away into the sky, and the woman escapes into worlds that are not her own, worlds where acting is convincing. Both are acting in their lives, and the roles they have to play. The woman “begin[s] to plot [her] getaway” from a life where she has to play the role of supportive woman and caretaker. Guy tells his wife that he will start the air balloon and will fulfill his role of finding his poor family “a really nice place with a nice plot of land where [they] could be something new.”

As both begin to convince themselves that they really can escape, both feel that they are going to face a judgment as if they were on stage. Guy asks his wife, “How do you think a man is judged after he’s gone?” Deep inside, Guy knows that his wife wants him “to feel like a man” and even warns his son that “when people