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.
Themes
Acceptance of Death in the Midst of Life
The story’s epigraph is a dedication to Jessica Wolfson, the author’s friend who died of a disease. This lends an aura of reality to the story, suggesting the story is rooted in autobiographical experience. The title references a cemetery, a collection of physical markers that memorialize the dead. The image represents death within life.
Although a persistent presence within the story, the word death is avoided, cleansed through euphemism and obscured through wordplay, understatement, and ambiguity. Rather than speak the word, the friend uses euphemisms such as “end o’ the line” (9). When the narrator shares a funny story, the friend’s response conflates humor with murder. She says, “Oh, you’re killing me” (3), an attempt to neutralize the horrific concept. After the friend dies, the narrator communicates this detail euphemistically by saying, “[S]he was moved to the cemetery” (9).
Despite the friend’s illness and likely imminent death, both narrator and friend hide their psychic pain behind the literal and metaphoric hospital masks they wear. Only after the friend’s death can the narrator begin to process her pain and grieve. The uncertainty and randomness of death has been paralyzing. The narrative ultimately implies the narrator’s irrational fears are stand-ins for a completely rational fear: death. On the day of the funeral, the narrator enrolls in a class to address her fear of flight. Taking the class is the narrator’s way of taking control of her irrational fears and working to accept her rational one, death.
Physical and Emotional Distance
Distance is both physical and emotional. Only the friend knows what it feels like to be terminally ill, and she is powerless to communicate it. Only the narrator knows what it feels like to stand by, helpless to prevent her friend’s suffering, useless to thwart her fate. The distance shows up in several ways. The friend wants to be close to the narrator and arranges for another hospital bed to be brought in so they can stay together, but the narrator feels anger at what the image implies and her dying friend’s imposition on her time and life. She thinks, “Then it hit me like an open coffin. She wants every minute […] She wants my life” (6).
The narrator’s anger and other unaddressed emotions create a further physical rift, causing the narrator to emotionally shut down. At various times, the narrator describes the visit in cinematic terms, creating analogies of the pair to television and movie characters. They are bank robbers, Lucy and Ethel, and Mary and Rhoda (8). The conversion of their situation to a movie or television product provides a further remove, enabling the narrator to ignore the present, the immediacy of her friend’s suffering, and feel, instead, as if she’s observing someone else’s life.
As the friends enjoy themselves by watching a movie—ironically about two friends cut down by sniper fire (8), a reminder that death can arrive unexpectedly by an unseen hand—the narrator cannot focus on the present. Her mind jumps ahead to the future when the friend will no longer be there: “I missed her already” (8), she mourns. She further mentally escapes during difficult circumstances, reminding herself that, unlike her sick friend, she will leave the hospital and revel in being free and alive: “I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway” (9).
Inadequacy of Language and Difficulty in Communicating
While the friends seem not to suffer from lack of conversational topics, their discussion has both spoken and unspoken boundaries. The friend asks for the conversation to be light, focused on “useless stuff” (1). Both have seemingly tacitly agreed to avoid any word that signifies death, except those spoken in jest or irony. For example, when a conversation borders on the humorous or outrageous, like the story of the dog who tattles on a girl using a flashlight to read late in the night, the dying friend says ironically, “Oh, you’re killing me” (3).
Specific words are also misinterpreted, as when the narrator tells the friend that she needs to go home; the friend thinks she means the friend’s home, not the narrator’s. The narrator clarifies by saying, “No, home home” (8).
The narrator mentions that, because she feels “self-conscious” at her conversation being monitored by the video camera, she stopped talking. Silence is also the response when neither participant knows what to say or is loath to share something that might offend the other. When the friend asks a question about the “chimp with the talking hands” (3), the narrator doesn’t respond.
Along with the opaque conversational tactics of humor, misinterpretation, and silence, the narrator deems persuasive rhetoric unwise. After noting how brave the friend has been through dangerous situations, the narrator “see[s] fear in her now, and [I’m] not going to try to talk her out of it” (5). This suggests that, when witnessing authentic painful emotions, a tempting response is to persuade the person, through carefully selected grammar and syntax, to abandon their emotions. The narrator’s response suggests such coaxing is ultimately a form of sophistry; it may make the persuader feel better, but does nothing to relieve the friend’s suffering. In short, language fails.
These examples help to construct a theme of words’ inadequacy to communicate the range of human emotion. They also portray the difficulty that people—even those who share the same vocabulary and language—experience in communication. Ironically, while the narrator and friend have scrupulously edited their conversations, what is unsaid or unsayable permeates the story and culminates in the story’s ending. The chimp, trained to use sign language and imparting to her child the same language, yearns to communicate to her dead baby. Similarly, the language shared by the narrator and her friend proves useless after her death. Now, neither the chimp nor the narrator can use language to communicate their grief.
