The story is set in a New York 150 years in the future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Soon, a woman arrives at a police station and says that she is the one who has been organizing the terrorist attacks. The boy soon reveals another bomb in his possession, and he says that he will kill himself and Cat once he truly loves her. Simon, Lucas’s older brother, was a fatality of such a job, a week before he was to marry Catherine. A section of Specimen Days is titled, "The Million Dead, Too, Summ'd Up- The Unknown." The major uniting device is that each story, or section of the novel, has a strange young boy who repeatedly quotes stray lines from the poems of Walt Whitman. In this section, Whitman is trying to make sense of the Civil War's incomprehensible destruction. She later meets with a Walt Whitman scholar who speaks of Whitman’s philosophy of the beauty of all aspects of life. This concern leads Lucas to fear for the life of Catherine, Simon's bereaved girlfriend. Lucas’s mother is ill and mentally deranged; so is his elderly father. Along with a Whitman-quoting boy, each story features as the major characters a man and a woman (although in the futuristic story, “Like Beauty,” neither of them is actually human), with the man called Simon and the woman’s name some version of Catherine. Each of the three stories depicts three central, semi-consistent character-types: a young boy, a man, and a woman. Walt Whitman was a contemporary of the time and Lucas meets him during the course of the story. The novel is divided into three novella-length stories set in three different time periods. 's Specimen Days for your kindle, tablet, IPAD, PC or mobile "In the Machine" takes place in New York City during the Industrial Revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. The garment factory burns down the next day, killing many workers. The third story of the novel is entitled Like Beauty, and it takes place at an unspecified point in the distant future. Lucas, for example, in “In the Machine,” buys the luminescent bowl from a boy on the street, despite its high cost in relation to his poverty, and takes it as an offering to Catherine, who had been his brother Simon’s girlfriend. Walt Whitman's poetry is also a common thread in each of the three stories, and the title is from Whitman's own prose works.[1]. He becomes allied with Catareen, an alien from the planet Nadia. In none of stories do the couples end up together. Specimen Days Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to The stories are loosely bound together by recurring devices. 1737 Words 7 Pages. In the first story the boy’s name is Lucas; in the second the unnamed boy says he likes the name Luke; in the third it is Luke. “In the Machine” is set sometime from 1870 to the early years of the twentieth century. The finder then passes it on to someone he or she cares about. Simon, a young man working in a factory had been accidentally sucked into a factory machine which crushed him to death. She flees the city with the boy. The stories take place in New York City at different times—past, present, and future. On the phone, the boy quotes a line of poetry by Walt Whitman. Due to the poverty present in the lower classes during the Industrial Revolution, Simon's family sends Lucas, Simon's disfigured younger brother, to work at the factory in Simon's place. In this light, Lucas' fears and Whitman's transcendental poetry represent the affirmation of humanity and each individual's importance. The first story, In the Machine, takes place in New York City in the mid-to-late-1800s. Whitman “haunts” the novel, reminiscent of the way Virginia Woolf unites the text in The Hours, though not so clearly. He has no one to ask when he might receive his pittance of money, or if his pay is similar to theirs. Walt Whitman Specimen Days Summary. However, Catherine’s life is spared because she was with Lucas at the hospital. Lucas' fear of Simon's ghost is, at the same time, a fear of the Machine and, on a larger scale, the Industrial Revolution in New York City itself. They are not the same persons, or even reincarnations of the same person, but in each story the man and woman fit the general roles of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” and the three pairs confront some of the same types of problems. He also appears poised to carry out a terrorist attack. The principal characters are Cat (an African-American woman working in a New York City police department), Simon (Cat's businessman boyfriend), and Luke (a child terrorist). The money Lucas receives for ten or more hours a day at the machine is abysmal. help you understand the book. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Cunningham, Michael. "In the Machine", set in mid-to-late 19th Century New York, begins in the aftermath of a wake. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. A third connecting device is the appearance at some point in each story of an unusual little bowl, presumably the same shining bowl in each story. The story opens in New York City, which is ruled by an autocratic council. In 1882, Walt Whitman published Specimen Days, a memorandum that encompasses many aspects of the Civil War. The first short story, "In the Machine", is a ghost story. . Lucas intentionally crushes his hand in a machine at work so that Catherine will accompany him to the hospital instead of going to the garment factory where she works. This study guide contains the following sections: This detailed literature summary also contains Quotes and a Free Quiz on The novel is divided into what are essentially three discrete short stories, unified by common threads such as character names and types, story location (New York City), story themes (such as shared humanity), and the presence of Walt Whitman (whether through actual physical presence, quotation of his works via narrator or character, or the spirit of his ideas expressed through narrator or character).

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