Morley Callaghan Essay, Research Paper

MORLEY CALLAGHAN The following short stories by Morley Callaghan all have the same morals in common. This lesson is realizing what is close to you before you lose it or you surrender yourself respect. Callaghan helps show people that everybody can make mistakes but you have to know when you make them in order to change them. This is evident in the proceeding stories, Getting on in the World, All the Years of Her Life and A Wedding Dress. Callaghan writes short story fable’s to teach his readers ethics about human nature and how we react to each other in society. Morley Callaghan is a great writer and a wonderful man who as written many novels, and short stories in his life. He is well known as a dignified achiever of Canadian literature, “the most original and obsessive writer of fiction we have had in this country” (Forten, p7). Callaghan was born on the 22nd of February in Toronto Ontario and graduated from the University of Toronto. He is a well respected novelist and short story writer who beliefs in his own work to help others.I look back on those stories and I find people in them who had the strength to stand up and go on. They experienced an interior triumph of the spirit, the only kind of triumph that counts, for the rest can be beaten out of you. That’s the history of my work (Callaghan, p13). Morley Callaghan has been writing all his life and during that time has been presented with any awards for his remarkable abilities. In the short story Getting on in the World, there is a young piano player who meets an attractive girl that falls in love with him, “I knew I was going to love you when I came” (Callaghan, p44), but he was not as interested in her. He lies however about his job and friends in order to impress her, “he sat down there pointing out people she might have read about in the newspapers. It all came out glibly, as if each one of them was an old friend” (Callaghan, p40). One night he forces her to go to a party of one of his bosses. She reluctantly went up and didn’t come down until 4:00 o’clock a.m. In this time Henry realized all that she really meant to him, “he began to hate them as if they were to blame for blinding him to what was so beautiful in her” (Callaghan, p176). He started to get incredibly jealous and angry at her for staying so late. When she came down he argued at her and she left him not knowing his feelings towards her. Callaghan wrote this story to show that you can not take for granted what is right in front of you, and you should cherish it before you lose what you don’t realize what you really have. Time is everlasting but we have only so much and it can be wasted by money, hatred, greed or anything imaginable. In the story A Wedding Dress, Lena Schartz waited 15 years to get married to Sam Hiltern until he got a better job. He finally did and they were going to get married. On the day before the wedding Lena went to look for a dress but did not have enough money to buy the one she wanted. So She stole the dress, “the dress disappearing steadily and finally slipping easily from the hanger, drawn into her wide sleeve” (Callaghan, p176). She was later caught when she got back home and missed her wedding because she was in jail. Sam bailed her out and paid for the wedding dress. They got married quietly as requested by the judge. Lena lost her self respect and Sam a Catholic man distrustfully lives with her knowing what she is capable of. Callaghan shows you many ways that your life can be transformed, and by waiting to long you can overlook what your intent was and become a despicable person, a person who has wasted there life away.

Callaghan wrote a story called All the Years of Her Life in which he showed also the importance of realizing what you have. Alfred a character in the story worked at a drugstore and stole cosmetic products from Mr. Carr the owner. Mr. Carr calls Alfred’s mom and she comes over acting very calm. They walk home Alfred tries to say something but his mother shuns him and then there is dead silence between them, “Be quit. Don’t speak to me. You’ve disgraced me again, that’s the last time” (Callaghan, p12). When they got home Alfred’s mom makes some coffee with her hands trembling, “It seemed to Alfred that this was the way it had been every time he had been in trouble before” (Callaghan, p13). Alfred realizes what he has done to his mother knowing that this was not the first time she had to come home, but happened nearly every month for his whole life. Wasting his mother’s life away and as well as his youth not able to get it back. Callaghan has show in a different way that you can ruin your life and others not realize what you have until you have shattered them beyond repair.Morley Callaghan has written many stories and obviously they do not have the same themes or morals deeds. However they are all stories that were written to help us make the right decisions. Callaghan is a highly well regarded man who has written stories to better our unjustly world. He has won many achievements that prove he is not only a great writer but he also knows what he is doing. He has proved his work to be a good learning guide to show people that we can be changed and anyone can do it. Callaghan writes his stories in order to educate people about honest and noble truths. He shows us that there are many ways you can harm people. He writes his stories so that you can learn from his character’s mistakes and make sure you do not make them.