Previous Next

“[In] this pragmatic world of ours, things you can’t sell don’t count for much.”

“Is the world such a pragmatic place?”

“I don’t know . . . But it explains a lot. It makes work easier, too . . . If you look at things that way, you avoid all kinds of complicated problems.”

“What an interesting view!”

“Not really. It’s what everybody thinks.”

This exchange occurs during the rising action of the story, just after the narrator and the magazine editor first meet. In the narrator’s view, the world he’s been inhabiting, and which everyone else still inhabits, is a practical place. It’s only concerned with things that make sense and have use. People want to buy things and see things in a way that makes them content and comfortable. To the narrator, this is the only explanation for how the world works. The townspeople, for instance, insist on viewing the world pragmatically and seeking out practical answers so that they don’t have to address the complicated problem of how an elephant has vanished into thin air. The narrator seems to hint that everybody is aware of this need to build a pragmatic world in order to feel safe and comforted and content. The magazine editor, however, questions his assumption. Her open mind and willingness to entertain the unexplainable raises the possibility that pragmatism is nothing but a façade.

I continue to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffee-makers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of memories I retain from that world. The more pragmatic I try to become, the more successfully I sell . . . That’s probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world.

This quote comes at the end of the story. The narrator is on the outside looking into the pragmatic world he once knew. He’s living in a different reality than everyone else, one in which elephants shrink down in front of his eyes and vanish in the night. The world he inhabits is one that contains improbable events. It is a world that is not unified or organized but rather chaotic and unpredictable. He’s still able to pretend that he’s living in the pragmatic world, but only by remembering his old way of viewing things. Because he now views the practical world as nothing but a façade, he’s able to truly see that people are desperate for things that will help the world make sense to them. He can see clearly, and that helps him to sell unity and comfort as a product to people who blindly live in the practical world.

Previous section Key Quotes Next section Loneliness in the Aftermath of Loss

Take a Study Break