James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues

Sonny’s Blues
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES BALDWIN
Baldwin was born in 1924 in the New York neighborhood of
Harlem. He was raised by his mother and step-father, a Baptist
minister who abused and ridiculed him. This abuse, as well as
the persistent racism Baldwin experienced while growing up,
had a deep influence on his writing. At 19, Baldwin began
devoting himself seriously to writing, publishing essays and
short stories whose success led him to move to Paris in 1948
on a fellowship. Baldwin would revisit Europe throughout his
life, citing its importance in giving him perspective on his
experiences in America and liberating him to write about
controversial American themes. Though Baldwin is best known
as a novelist and essayist, he was also a playwright, a poet, a
critic, and a writer of short stories. Baldwin, the grandson of a
slave, was a prolific voice of the civil rights movement due to
the overriding concern in his stories and essays with racism in
America. Openly gay, he was also known for his frank treatment
of taboo subjects like homosexuality and interracial
relationships. Widely considered to be one of the greatest
American writers of the 20th century, Baldwin’s influence lives
on in writers like Toni Morrison and Joan Didion.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
“Sonny’s Blues” takes place in 1950s Harlem, a New York
neighborhood known as the center of urban black life in
America at the time. Between the 1920s and 1950s, African
Americans began moving northward in what was called the
Great Migration, a mass relocation in order to escape the Jim

Crow South and seek economic opportunity. In the decades
prior to “Sonny’s Blues,” Harlem transformed into an almost
entirely African American neighborhood, and it was particularly
known for the period of artistic prosperity in the 1920s known
as the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to its rich culture,
Harlem was known to be a place of vice, poverty, and violence.
This is reflected in “Sonny’s Blues”—for example, the
notoriously poor housing conditions in Harlem led to the
construction of many of the housing projects that Baldwin
mentions in the story. Harlem was also a destination for jazz
performers with its popular and storied venues, such as the
Cotton Club, although by the 1950s many jazz venues had
migrated downtown, as “Sonny’s Blues” suggests.
RELATED LITERARY WORKS
Many of James Baldwin’s other literary works deal with themes
similar to those in “Sonny’s Blues,” particularly his semi-
autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain. Richard
Wright, a friend of Baldwin’s, also wrote of the lives of young
urban black men in the mid-twentieth century in Black
BoyBlack Boy and
NativNative Sone Son, and Ralph Ellison likewise did so in
InInvisible Manvisible Man.
Other writers who have incorporated meditations on African
American music into their work include Ishmael Reed, Langston
Hughes, Albert Murray, Jean Toomer, and even Jack Kerouac.
Throughout his life, Baldwin frequently cited the importance of
Henry James on his writing. James, another American writing
abroad, shared Baldwin’s concern with people whose identity
was at odds with the predominant culture around them.
KEY FACTS
• Full Title: Sonny’s Blues

• When Written: 1957
• Where Written: Paris
• When Published: 1957 originally, and then in the collection
Going to Meet the Man in 1965
• Literary Period: 20th Century African American Literature
• Genre: Short Story
• Setting: Harlem, New York, USA
• Climax: The ending, in which the narrator listens to Sonny
play at the jazz club
• Antagonist: Drugs, Racism
• Point of View: First person
EXTRA CREDIT
Preaching Potential. At age 14 Baldwin became a devoted
member of a Pentecostal church, eventually becoming a wildly
popular Junior Minister. While he lost his faith at 17, he viewed
his time in the church as an important step in overcoming some
of the difficulties of his personal life, like his abusive
stepfather.
Much of Baldwin’s work is inflected with Biblical imagery and
allusion.
Activism and Fame. Baldwin was a nonviolent civil rights
activist who wrote prolifically about racism in the United
States, and who allied himself with civil rights organizations
like

the influential Congress on Racial Equality and the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1963, Baldwin was on
the cover of Time for his importance in bringing to life the
experiences of African Americans living with racism, and his
unique ability to illuminate the ideas of civil rights to white and
black audiences alike.
INTRINTRODUCTIONODUCTION
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The story opens on the unnamed narrator, who has just read in
the newspaper that his little brother Sonny was arrested for
using and selling heroin. Throughout his day, he cannot think of
anything else. He’s a high school algebra teacher, and he looks
at his young students, wondering which ones are, like Sonny,
turning to drugs to escape the suffering of their lives as young
black men in Harlem.
The narrator runs into an old friend of Sonny’s—a drug
user—on the way to the subway, and their conversation makes
the narrator understand how hard prison will be for Sonny. Still,
the narrator says he doesn’t plan to do anything to help Sonny,
though he gives Sonny’s friend money when he asks.
The story jumps ahead to months later, when the narrator’s
young daughter Grace has just died of polio and the narrator
finally, in his grief, decides to write to Sonny in jail. Sonny

replies
that he needed to hear from his brother, but didn’t want to
reach out first because he knows the pain he has caused. The
two strike up a correspondence, and when Sonny is released
from jail he comes to live with the narrator’s family in Harlem.
Having Sonny around seems to trigger the narrator’s memories
of his childhood, and the story jumps back in time. The narrator
recalls that right after his father died, his mother made him
promise not to let anything happen to Sonny. The narrator
didn’t understand her worry, so she told him about how his
father had watched his brother (a musician, like Sonny) get run
over by a car of drunk white men. The narrator’s mother
reminds him that he has a brother too, and the world hasn’t
changed.
When the narrator’s mother dies soon after, he gets a furlough
from the army to attend the funeral. The narrator is married to
a woman named Isabel, and he arranges for teenaged Sonny to
go live with Isabel’s parents until he finishes school. During
this
visit he has a conversation in which Sonny reveals his desire to
be a jazz musician, and the narrator discourages him harshly.
Living with the narrator’s wife’s family, Sonny plays their
piano
day and night. Eventually, after the family learns he hasn’t been
going to school, Sonny joins the navy and leaves without saying
goodbye. The next time the narrator sees Sonny is after the
war. Sonny is living downtown with a group of musicians. The
narrator and Sonny have a horrible fight, and they don’t speak
again until the narrator writes to Sonny in jail.
The story then returns to the present, when Sonny has been
living with the narrator for two weeks. The narrator is home
alone watching a revival meeting across the street, and he sees
Sonny at the edge of the crowd listening to them sing. Sonny

comes upstairs and invites the narrator to hear him play in the
Village that night. The narrator agrees to come, and they
discuss the woman singing across the street at the revival
meeting. It triggers a conversation about the intensity of
suffering, and how drugs and music can be an escape from it, a
way not to be shaken to pieces by the world. Sonny reminds the
narrator that, while he is clean now, his troubles aren’t
necessarily over, and the narrator silently promises to always
be there for Sonny.
The two of them go to the nightclub, and the narrator is
surprised by how admired and beloved Sonny is by everyone
there—Sonny has his own world that the narrator doesn’t know
anything about. Sonny and his band begin to play, and the
narrator thinks about how rare it is to have an experience
where music touches you. That leads him to reflect on how
difficult it must be to play music, to have to impose order on all
the rage and delight and confusion inside of people. Sonny
seems to struggle at first to really put himself into the music,
but eventually Sonny hits his stride and the narrator, listening
from a corner, tears up thinking about suffering: his own,
Sonny’s, their parents, and the suffering in the world around
them. He realizes that music is telling everyone’s story, and that
it’s a gift to strive to tell it anew in a way that will make an
audience listen and make them confront their demons in a way
that makes them feel less alone.
When the band pauses, the narrator buys Sonny a drink and the
bartender puts the glass on top of his piano. Sonny sips it,
meets eyes with the narrator, and returns to playing. The
narrator watches the glass shake sitting on the piano above
Sonny’s head, comparing it to “the very cup of trembling.”
MAJOR CHARACTERS

The NarrThe Narratorator – The first-person narrator of
“Sonny’s Blues” is a
high school math teacher in Harlem. As the story begins, he has
to decide how to handle his brother Sonny’s trouble with
addiction. The narrator is acutely aware of the drugs, violence,
and lack of opportunity that pervade his neighborhood, and he
has spent his whole life fighting to avoid meeting the fate of
those around him. He has a good job, he’s married with
children, and he seems devoted to living an orderly and
upstanding life—a devotion that has paradoxically served to
make him bitter and obsessed with the very suffering he’s
trying to avoid. The narrator has a complex relationship to
family. While he has crafted a traditional and loving family for
himself, his relationship to his brother Sonny is fraught, and he
feels guilty that he has watched Sonny suffer without
intervening, as he promised his late mother that he would. Over
the course of the story, as the narrator is forced to grapple
more with the suffering of others, his relationship to Sonny
improves and he becomes a warmer and more compassionate
character.
SonnSonnyy – Sonny is the narrator’s brother. He’s a jazz
musician
and a heroin addict who lived a bohemian life in New York
prior
PLPLOOT SUMMARYT SUMMARY
CHARACHARACTERSCTERS

to being arrested for his drug abuse and sent to jail. Sonny is
passionate, freethinking, and not particularly responsible. As
his strained relationship to the narrator recovers over the
course of the story, Sonny is able to stay off of drugs and begin
to rebuild his life. While Baldwin does not maintain complete
optimism about Sonny’s odds of beating his addiction, Sonny
does manage to bring joy into the narrator’s family, and his
music allows the narrator to begin to acknowledge his own
suffering, a crucial development in mitigating the misery that
the narrator feels about his regimented and fearful life.
The NarrThe Narrator’s Motherator’s Mother — The narrator’s
mother is not alive in
“Sonny’s Blues,” but the narrator remembers her at length in
the middle of the story. She is described as a wise and caring
woman who took on the problems and sorrows of her family;
this is best shown when she tells the narrator about his father’s
troubles, and admits that she was the only one he ever talked to
about it. Significantly, the narrator’s mother also makes the
narrator promise her that he will keep Sonny out of trouble and
always be there for him. This shows her great insight into her
sons and her deep caring for them; the promise ultimately helps
not only Sonny, but also the narrator, because it keeps him from
allowing his strained relationship with Sonny to persist and
forces him to become more compassionate.
The NarrThe Narrator’s Fatherator’s Father — The narrator’s
father is also not alive
in “Sonny’s Blues,” but through the narrator’s memories of him
and his mother’s stories about him, Baldwin gives a glimpse of
who he was. The narrator’s father is described as someone who
could be hopeful and caring, but was also plagued by
despair—he drank on weekends, eventually drinking himself to
death. Though the narrator never knew this while his father
was alive, the source of the narrator’s father’s torment was

having witnessed the death of his own brother when a car of
drunk white men ran him over on purpose. The narrator’s
father suffered deeply from this event, but kept his suffering
private, preferring to handle it by drinking and only confessing
his feelings to his wife.
The NarrThe Narrator’s Father’s Brotherator’s Father’s Brother
— The narrator’s father’s
brother only appears in “Sonny’s Blues” through the narrator’s
memory of a story his mother told him, but nonetheless he is a
consequential character because his death is at the center of
much of their familial pain. The narrator’s mother describes the
narrator’s uncle as a man somewhat similar to Sonny—he was a
musician and enjoyed a reckless and bohemian social life. He
died when, while walking home from a concert with the
narrator’s father, a car of drunk racists ran him over. The death
broke the narrator’s father’s heart, leading the narrator’s father
to repress his sorrow, which set an example for the narrator to
do the same.
IsabelIsabel — Isabel is the narrator’s wife. She is shown to be
a kind
and understanding person who is happy to take Sonny into
their family, despite his troubles. Isabel’s great sorrow was
witnessing the agonizing death of their daughter Grace, and
she often cries to the narrator about it at night or wakes up
with nightmares. Despite having experienced the traumatic loss
of a child, she and the narrator seem to have a kind and loving
marriage.
The NarrThe Narrator’s Sonsator’s Sons — The narrator’s sons
are most frequently
invoked in the story to demonstrate the destructive potential of
Harlem. The narrator worries constantly that these kind and
good-natured boys will become corrupted by the drugs,

violence, and rage of Harlem. Otherwise, nearly all that is
conveyed about the boys is that they are welcoming to Sonny
and they treat him well.
CreoleCreole — Creole is the leader of the band Sonny plays
with at
the jazz club. He is older than Sonny and the narrator, and
clearly an experienced musician—the narrator realizes quickly
when they start playing that Creole is in control of everything
that is happening onstage. Creole is shown to be a
compassionate guide to Sonny as he navigates his first
performance after his time in jail. Sonny struggles to play at
first, and it is Creole’s firm guidance and trust that finally
pushes Sonny into playing his best.
Isabel’s PIsabel’s Parentsarents — All Baldwin tells us about
Isabel’s parents is
that they didn’t approve of the narrator marrying their
daughter, and yet they took in teenaged, orphaned Sonny
anyway for the narrator’s sake. It’s a kindness that’s not
straightforward; while taking Sonny in is obviously generous,
they don’t make him feel terribly welcome, which leads him to
flee.
SonnSonny’s Fy’s Friendriend — Sonny’s friend is, like Sonny,
an addict in
Harlem. The narrator recognizes him because he’s always on
the streets asking for money. At the beginning of the story,
Sonny’s friend tracks down the narrator to tell him about
Sonny’s arrest, and in the course of their conversation Sonny’s
friend is able to elicit compassion from the narrator for Sonny’s
plight, even though it doesn’t inspire him to reach out to Sonny
in jail.
MINOR CHARACTERS

GrGraceace — Grace is the narrator’s youngest child who died
of
polio at the age of two. The grief that her death causes in the
narrator is what makes him finally able to step outside of
himself and consider Sonny’s suffering, leading him to repair
their relationship.
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THEMESTHEMES
CYCLES OF SUFFERING
The central concern of “Sonny’s Blues” is suffering:
Baldwin emphasizes that suffering is universal, and
that it is also cyclical—that suffering tends to lead
to more suffering. Baldwin demonstrates the effects of
suffering on several different scales: he shows the way
suffering affects an individual life, the way it affects a family
throughout generations, and the way it affects a society overall.
The story—set in 1950s Harlem, a New York neighborhood
that was then at the center of urban black life—is particularly
concerned with the difficult lives that await young black men in

America. This is shown through the narrator’s reflections on
the sad futures that his high school students face (lives of
drugs, violence, and rage at having “their heads bumped
abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities”), as
well as the narrator’s and Sonny’s difficulty leaving Harlem
despite their desire to get out. Baldwin shows that suffering is a
central component of the African American experience, and
Harlem is portrayed as a trap—a place of violence and suffering
that, because of the trauma and racism its residents experience,
is nearly impossible to escape.
Throughout the course of the story, Baldwin also reveals the
parallel suffering occurring in the lives of different members of
the narrator’s family, which emphasizes the echoes between
the sufferings of previous generations and the suffering of the
present. For instance, the narrator’s father’s despair over
having watched his brother die mirrors the narrator’s own guilt
and sadness about his failure to help Sonny with his addiction.
Baldwin is not optimistic, either, about the next generation—the
narrator, despite his becoming a schoolteacher, has not been
able to provide better opportunities for his own children. They
live in a rundown housing project and his daughter died an
agonizing death of polio. He worries that his sons, like Sonny,
will fall into the drugs that are everywhere on the streets of
their neighborhood. This suggests that suffering is passed
down generationally.
“Sonny’s Blues” also explores the ways that individual
suffering
ruins lives, particularly due to people’s reticence or inability to
talk about their suffering. Baldwin shows how private suffering
turns people bitter, estranges relationships, and even leads
people to illness, addiction, or death. This is revealed most
poignantly through the narrator who, at first glance, seems to
be living a better life than Sonny. As the story progresses,
however, we begin to understand the magnitude of the

narrator’s anger, bitterness, and fear—he seems obsessed with
avoiding the suffering that has plagued his family and
community, but that obsession has effectively meant that he is
fixated on suffering in a way that makes him miserable. While
Sonny is more able to speak of his suffering than the narrator,
he too seems to have been overwhelmed by suffering, which
led him to addiction (itself a microcosm of self-perpetuating
suffering), legal trouble, and temporary estrangement from his
brother.
Baldwin does not promise an easy escape to such
overwhelming suffering, but he does give hints that the burden
of these cycles of suffering can be lessened. The narrator’s
epiphany at the jazz club shows the importance of expressing
suffering in order to take control of it, and Sonny’s friendships
with musicians show how creating community can bring relief.
FAMILY BONDS
In “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin asks how much family
members owe to one another, and he examines the
fallout when familial compassion fails and
obligations are only halfheartedly met. The most explicit
example of this is the narrator’s failure for most of the story to
live up to his promise to his mother that he would always be
there for Sonny. Another example of a halfheartedly met family
obligation is when the narrator’s wife’s family takes orphaned
Sonny in, but makes it clear that they only did so because it was
proper, not because they had compassion for Sonny’s
predicament. Both of these instances of familial indifference
compounded Sonny’s problems and fueled his despair, showing
the power of family to grievously harm.
However, while familial cruelty or indifference propels the plot

of “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin resolves the story by exploring
how
much more complex a family obligation is than it can initially
appear. He suggests that family obligations, when met with real
compassion, are mutually rewarding. The possibilities of a
family relationship built on compassion emerge most clearly
through the narrator’s growth once Sonny moves in with his
family. At first, the narrator believes that he has been asked to
care for Sonny because he is the more stable brother—he
thinks that he has something to give Sonny, but nothing to gain
by helping him. As the story progresses, however, and the
narrator becomes open to understanding and accepting who
Sonny is, the narrator begins to absolve himself of the guilt of
having failed both his brother and mother. Also, more
importantly, it becomes clear that Sonny’s music is an antidote
to the bitterness and hopelessness that the narrator feels.
Sonny and the narrator need one another—Sonny needs
compassion and a place to stay, while the narrator needs a
model of somebody who is striving for joy in spite of the
suffering all around them. Their bond, then, is mutually
beneficial.
It’s possible to see this complexity, too, in the narrator’s
promise to his mother, a promise she forced him to make. The
narrator’s mother sees this promise as a corrective to the
previous generation’s tragedy, in which the narrator’s father
failed to protect his own brother from a senseless and violent
death. The narrator’s mother was the only person who saw the
extent of her husband’s suffering afterwards, and, while the
promise appears at first to be for Sonny’s benefit, it could also
be seen as the mother’s attempt to spare the narrator a grief

similar to his father’s. Overall, the story suggests that, while it
is
tempting to view family relationships and obligations as
straightforward and even transactional, showing real
compassion for family can offer surprising rewards, including
the relief of a person’s most intractable suffering.
PASSION, RESTRAINT, AND CONTROL
The narrator and Sonny, as black men in America,
live in a world that tries to control them. They also
live in a world that seems completely overwhelming
because it is so saturated with suffering. Baldwin sets up the
two brothers as being emblematic of two diverging responses
to this pervasive suffering. One chooses a life of passion,
idolizing artistic expression and casting aside a traditional life
in
order to find meaning, and the other is scrupulous about being
responsible and living an orderly life. Both of these lifestyles
are, in essence, an attempt to control the suffering they face.
Baldwin does not propose that one of these modes of living is
better than the other—each is shown to have severe
drawbacks—nor does he suggest that suffering can ever be
fully controlled, but he does show that the brothers can help
one another by sharing the strengths that each mode of coping
with suffering provides.
The narrator, who is the older of the brothers, is shown as living
a life devoted to responsibility and rational decision making. He
joins the army, gets married, has a family, works as a high
school
math teacher, and is all the while in a simmering rage that his

choices have not led him to a better life than the one he grew
up with, and that his sacrifices will not provide better
opportunities for his children than the ones he had. Baldwin
shows that, paradoxically, the narrator’s obsession with
choosing a path that would lead him away from suffering has
actually caused him to suffer because he has not prioritized
finding joy or meaning in his life.
Sonny, the younger brother, has known since he was little that
he loved music, and he decides to make a life of it because, as
far as he is concerned, “people ought to do what they want to
do, what else are they alive for?” Sonny’s pursuit of music
leads
him to not graduate from high school and to keep the company
of people who lead him to drug use, which derails his life and
lands him in prison. While Sonny is certainly the brother whose
life seems, on the surface, more dominated by suffering
(addiction, jail, having nowhere to go), he also is able to
channel
that suffering into something beautiful through his music.
Since suffering has led both brothers to lives that are, in some
way, incomplete or unsustainable, Baldwin shows that they
need one another. Sonny’s devotion to his passion means that
he relies on the fruits of the narrator’s restraint—his home,
family, and money—in order to start rebuilding his life. The
narrator, though, also needs to be close to Sonny’s passion in
order to bring joy and relief into his life that has been, so far,
consumed by rage and bitterness. At the end of the story,
Baldwin gives readers a glimpse of how the blending of their
lifestyles gives them new ways to see the control they crave.
Music, the narrator begins to understand, is a way to impose
order and even beauty on emotions that are dark and often
incomprehensible. To listen to Sonny’s music liberates the
narrator from his excruciating need to control all of the

darkness in his world by suppressing his emotions. Music helps
him understand that his feelings about suffering, while terrible,
can also be an opportunity to access community and
compassion.
SALVATION AND RELIEF
Each of the characters in “Sonny’s Blues” is living a
life that is, in some way, governed by suffering, but
it is the significant instances of salvation and relief
that prevent “Sonny’s Blues” from being utterly hopeless and
tragic. Salvation and relief come in many forms in the story,
some better than others, but it is the final invocation of the
“cup of trembling” (a quote from the Biblical Book of Isaiah)
that suggests a relief from suffering that might endure.
Sonny’s drug use is one way of finding relief from suffering. He
describes the feeling of heroin as something that makes him
feel “distant” and “in control,” the latter being a feeling that
“you’ve got to have” sometimes. Sonny, then, has turned to
drugs in order to escape the feeling that the suffering in his life
is not within his control. His drug use, of course, ultimately
compounds his suffering instead of allowing him to escape it.
Sonny’s music is a more complex example of relief from
suffering. While the narrator initially considers music to be a
way for Sonny to shirk his responsibilities, he ultimately
realizes that Sonny’s music fuels his life; it’s a way for him to
make his suffering meaningful, and without it he would likely
succumb to despair. In the passage in which the narrator listens
to Sonny play at the bar, Baldwin makes clear that Sonny’s
music is never separate from his suffering; playing piano is not
an instance of pure joy in a horrible world, but rather an art that
allows Sonny to make sense of suffering and turn it into
something beautiful. This then lets him communicate with

others and make people feel less alone. While listening to
Sonny, the narrator realizes that music has the power to “help
us to be free,” in his case because it helps him, for the first
time,
acknowledge his own sadness.
The final sentence of “Sonny’s Blues” describes a glass of milk
and scotch that the narrator has given his brother. Baldwin
writes, “it glowed and shook above my brother’s head …
ISS305: Reading Diary Questions
Module #3
4 Total Questions
Q1: Ownership Peculiarities [40 points]
Think about something that you have pride in owning – perhaps
it is the car that you bought and
fixed up, or a particular item that you had to work very hard to
save up enough money to buy.
Describe this item. Now, using Ariely’s ownership
“peculiarities”, analyze why you have such
pride in owing it. Describe the amount of work you had to put
into getting this item. Was the
item advertised in anyway? And if so, do you believe seeing the
advertisement caused you to
imagine it was yours before your bought it? Before you had it,
did you imagine how great it
would be to own it? Do you believe that your imagined
ownership caused you to spend more
time and effort to get it? Now if you could go back in time,
would you still work as hard for this,
or would you consider other possibilities? How would you feel

now if you had to “downgrade” to
a lesser version of your item? Would you view this
“downgrade” as a painful loss?
Q2: More Options, More Problems! [30 points]
According to Ariely’s door experiment, a person will keep their
options open, even if it might
hurt them, or end up being worthless in the long run. Do you
believe this to be true? For this
question, we would like you to examine the results and findings
of Ariely’s door experiment. First,
briefly summarize the results of the door experiment. Next,
identify a time where keeping your
options open was irrational for your long-term goals, or caused
you to buy something that you
didn’t truly need. Have you ever found that taking additional
time in choosing between your
options caused you to miss out on something you might have
otherwise enjoyed? How might you
take Ariely’s findings and apply them to your life such that you
are not tricked into chasing
worthless options?
Q3: Poll Analysis [40 points]
Investigate the validity of a poll for yourself, using what
Wheelan has taught us about these
instruments' potential biases. Start by finding a recently
published poll online. (If you don't
frequent news websites or have a particular issue in mind, an
easy way to find a recent poll is to
go to a website like gallup.com, or you can Google something
like “new york times poll,”
“washington post poll,” “cnn poll,” etc.) State what poll you're
investigating, who carried it out

and when, and where it can be found online (with a specific
URL). Next, find and read the
description of the poll's methodology, and summarize the
sampling methods used to collect the
data. Then skim the poll's questions and evaluate how well some
of the more interesting
questions avoid bias through their wording. Give three
examples, either of bad choices of
wording, or of good choices where different wording might have
produced biased answers.
Finally, evaluate the overall validity of the poll. Does the
sampling method seem like it provides a
sample representative of the respective population? Are the
questions asked in such a way as to
promote honest and accurate answers?
Q4: Statistics, the Breakfast of Champions [40 points]
Imagine that you've just collected a bunch of data on college
students, particularly their eating
habits and their performance in school. Because of all that
you've learned from Wheelan, your
sampling and measurement methods are flawless, so now you're
ready to do some hypothesis
testing. You're convinced that college students who eat
Wheaties breakfast cereal (the “breakfast
of champions”) get better grades than those who do not eat
Wheaties. Beyond that, you believe
that the more Wheaties a given student eats, the better his or her
grades will be. Describe and
explain the process of carrying out your test of this hypothesis,
step by step, beginning with a null

hypothesis and finally stating your findings. (Make up the
needed unknown statistics if it makes it
easier to describe and explain the process.)
naked statistics
Stripping the Dread from the Data
CHARLES WHEELAN
Dedication
For Katrina
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Why I hated calculus but love statistics
1 What’s the Point?
2 Descriptive Statistics: Who was the best baseball player of all
time?

Appendix to Chapter 2
3 Deceptive Description: “He’s got a great personality!” and
other true but
grossly misleading statements
4 Correlation: How does Netflix know what movies I like?
5 Basic Probability: Don’t buy the extended warranty on your
$99 printer
5½ The Monty Hall Problem
6 Problems with Probability: How overconfident math geeks
nearly
destroyed the global financial system
7 The Importance of Data: “Garbage in, garbage out”
8 The Central Limit Theorem: The Lebron James of statistics
9 Inference: Why my statistics professor thought I might have
cheated
kindle:embed:0003?mime=image/jpg
10 Polling: How we know that 64 percent of Americans support
the death
penalty (with a sampling error ± 3 percent)

11 Regression Analysis: The miracle elixir
12 Common Regression Mistakes: The mandatory warning label
13 Program Evaluation: Will going to Harvard change your life?
Conclusion: Five questions that statistics can help answer
Appendix: Statistical software
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
More praise for Naked Statistics
Also by Charles Wheelan
Copyright
Introduction
Why I hated calculus but love statistics
I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with math. I
don’t like
numbers for the sake of numbers. I am not impressed by fancy
formulas
that have no real-world application. I particularly disliked high
school
calculus for the simple reason that no one ever bothered to tell
me why I
needed to learn it. What is the area beneath a parabola? Who
cares?
In fact, one of the great moments of my life occurred during my

senior
year of high school, at the end of the first semester of Advanced
Placement
Calculus. I was working away on the final exam, admittedly less
prepared
for the exam than I ought to have been. (I had been accepted to
my first-
choice college a few weeks earlier, which had drained away
what little
motivation I had for the course.) As I stared at the final exam
questions,
they looked completely unfamiliar. I don’t mean that I was
having trouble
answering the questions. I mean that I didn’t even recognize
what was
being asked. I was no stranger to being unprepared for exams,
but, to
paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, I usually knew what I didn’t
know. This
exam looked even more Greek than usual. I flipped through the
pages of the
exam for a while and then more or less surrendered. I walked to
the front of
the classroom, where my calculus teacher, whom we’ll call
Carol Smith,
was proctoring the exam. “Mrs. Smith,” I said, “I don’t
recognize a lot of
the stuff on the test.”
Suffice it to say that Mrs. Smith did not like me a whole lot
more than I
liked her. Yes, I can now admit that I sometimes used my
limited powers as
student association president to schedule all-school assemblies
just so that
Mrs. Smith’s calculus class would be canceled. Yes, my friends

and I did
have flowers delivered to Mrs. Smith during class from “a
secret admirer”
just so that we could chortle away in the back of the room as
she looked
around in embarrassment. And yes, I did stop doing any
homework at all
once I got in to college.
So when I walked up to Mrs. Smith in the middle of the exam
and said
that the material did not look familiar, she was, well,
unsympathetic.
“Charles,” she said loudly, ostensibly to me but facing the rows
of desks to
make certain that the whole class could hear, “if you had
studied, the
material would look a lot more familiar.” This was a compelling
point.
So I slunk back to my desk. After a few minutes, Brian
Arbetter, a far
better calculus student than I, walked to the front of the room
and
whispered a few things to Mrs. Smith. She whispered back and
then a truly
extraordinary thing happened. “Class, I need your attention,”
Mrs. Smith
announced. “It appears that I have given you the second
semester exam by
mistake.” We were far enough into the test period that the
whole exam had
to be aborted and rescheduled.

I cannot fully describe my euphoria. I would go on in life to
marry a
wonderful woman. We have three healthy children. I’ve
published books
and visited places like the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat. Still, the
day that my
calculus teacher got her comeuppance is a top five life moment.
(The fact
that I nearly failed the makeup final exam did not significantly
diminish this
wonderful life experience.)
The calculus exam incident tells you much of what you need to
know
about my relationship with mathematics—but not everything.
Curiously, I
loved physics in high school, even though physics relies very
heavily on the
very same calculus that I refused to do in Mrs. Smith’s class.
Why? Because
physics has a clear purpose. I distinctly remember my high
school physics
teacher showing us during the World Series how we could use
the basic
formula for acceleration to estimate how far a home run had
been hit. That’s
cool—and the same formula has many more socially significant
applications.
Once I arrived in college, I thoroughly enjoyed probability,
again because
it offered insight into interesting real-life situations. In
hindsight, I now
recognize that it wasn’t the math that bothered me in calculus
class; it was

that no one ever saw fit to explain the point of it. If you’re not
fascinated by
the elegance of formulas alone—which I am most emphatically
not—then it
is just a lot of tedious and mechanistic formulas, at least the
way it was
taught to me.
That brings me to statistics (which, for the purposes of this
book,
includes probability). I love statistics. Statistics can be used to
explain
everything from DNA testing to the idiocy of playing the
lottery. Statistics
can help us identify the factors associated with diseases like
cancer and
heart disease; it can help us spot cheating on standardized tests.
Statistics
can even help you win on game shows. There was a famous
program during
my childhood called Let’s Make a Deal, with its equally famous
host,
Monty Hall. At the end of each day’s show, a successful player
would stand
with Monty facing three big doors: Door no. 1, Door no. 2, and
Door no. 3.
Monty Hall explained to the player that there was a highly
desirable prize
behind one of the doors—something like a new car—and a goat
behind the
other two. The idea was straightforward: the player chose one of
the doors
and would get the contents behind that door.

As each player stood facing the doors with Monty Hall, he or
she had a 1
in 3 chance of choosing the door that would be opened to reveal
the
valuable prize. But Let’s Make a Deal had a twist, which has
delighted
statisticians ever since (and perplexed everyone else). After the
player
chose a door, Monty Hall would open one of the two remaining
doors,
always revealing a goat. For the sake of example, assume that
the player has
chosen Door no. 1. Monty would then open Door no. 3; the live
goat would
be standing there on stage. Two doors would still be closed,
nos. 1 and 2. If
the valuable prize was behind no. 1, the contestant would win;
if it was
behind no. 2, he would lose. But then things got more
interesting: Monty
would turn to the player and ask whether he would like to
change his mind
and switch doors (from no. 1 to no. 2 in this case). Remember,
both doors
were still closed, and the only new information the contestant
had received
was that a goat showed up behind one of the doors that he didn’t
pick.
Should he switch?
The answer is yes. Why? That’s in Chapter 5½.
The paradox of statistics is that they are everywhere—from
batting
averages to presidential polls—but the discipline itself has a
reputation for

being uninteresting and inaccessible. Many statistics books and
classes are
overly laden with math and jargon. Believe me, the technical
details are
crucial (and interesting)—but it’s just Greek if you don’t
understand the
intuition. And you may not even care about the intuition if
you’re not
convinced that there is any reason to learn it. Every chapter in
this book
promises to answer the basic question that I asked (to no effect)
of my high
school calculus teacher: What is the point of this?
This book is about the intuition. It is short on math, equations,
and
graphs; when they are used, I promise that they will have a clear
and
enlightening purpose. Meanwhile, the book is long on examples
to convince
you that there are great reasons to learn this stuff. Statistics can
be really
interesting, and most of it isn’t that difficult.
The idea for this book was born not terribly long after my
unfortunate
experience in Mrs. Smith’s AP Calculus class. I went to
graduate school to
study economics and public policy. Before the program even
started, I was
assigned (not surprisingly) to “math camp” along with the bulk
of my
classmates to prepare us for the quantitative rigors that were to

follow. For
three weeks, we learned math all day in a windowless, basement
classroom
(really).
On one of those days, I had something very close to a career
epiphany.
Our instructor was trying to teach us the circumstances under
which the
sum of an infinite series converges to a finite number. Stay with
me here for
a minute because this concept will become clear. (Right now
you’re
probably feeling the way I did in that windowless classroom.)
An infinite
series is a pattern of numbers that goes on forever, such as 1 +
½ + ¼ + ⅛ .
. . The three dots means that the pattern continues to infinity.
This is the part we were having trouble wrapping our heads
around. Our
instructor was trying to convince us, using some proof I’ve long
since
forgotten, that a series of numbers can go on forever and yet
still add up
(roughly) to a finite number. One of my classmates, Will
Warshauer, would
have none of it, despite the impressive mathematical proof. (To
be honest, I
was a bit skeptical myself.) How can something that is infinite
add up to
something that is finite?
Then I got an inspiration, or more accurately, the intuition of
what the
instructor was trying to explain. I turned to Will and talked him

through
what I had just worked out in my head. Imagine that you have
positioned
yourself exactly 2 feet from a wall.
Now move half the distance to that wall (1 foot), so that you are
left
standing 1 foot away.
From 1 foot away, move half the distance to the wall once again
(6
inches, or ½ a foot). And from 6 inches away, do it again (move
3 inches,
or ¼ of a foot). Then do it again (move 1½ inches, or ⅛ of a
foot). And so
on.
You will gradually get pretty darn close to the wall. (For
example, when
you are 1/1024th of an inch from the wall, you will move half
the distance,
or another 1/2048th of an inch.) But you will never hit the wall,
because by
definition each move takes you only half the remaining
distance. In other
words, you will get infinitely close to the wall but never hit it.
If we
measure your moves in feet, the series can be described as 1 +
½ + ¼ + ⅛ .
. .
Therein lies the insight: Even though you will continue moving
forever
—with each move taking you half the remaining distance to the

wall—the
total distance you travel can never be more than 2 feet, which is
your
starting distance from the wall. For mathematical purposes, the
total
distance you travel can be approximated as 2 feet, which turns
out to be
very handy for computation purposes. A mathematician would
say that the
sum of this infinite series 1 ft + ½ ft + ¼ ft + ⅛ ft . . .
converges to 2 feet,
which is what our instructor was trying to teach us that day.
The point is that I convinced Will. I convinced myself. I can’t
remember
the math proving that the sum of an infinite series can converge
to a finite
number, but I can always look that up online. And when I do, it
will
probably make sense. In my experience, the intuition makes the
math and
other technical details more understandable—but not necessarily
the other
way around.
The point of this book is to make the most important statistical
concepts
more intuitive and more accessible, not just for those of us
forced to study
them in windowless classrooms but for anyone interested in the
extraordinary power of numbers and data.
Now, having just made the case that the core tools of statistics
are less
intuitive and accessible than they ought to be, I’m going to
make a

seemingly contradictory point: Statistics can be overly
accessible in the
sense that anyone with data and a computer can do sophisticated
statistical
procedures with a few keystrokes. The problem is that if the
data are poor,
or if the statistical techniques are used improperly, the
conclusions can be
wildly misleading and even potentially dangerous. Consider the
following
hypothetical Internet news flash: People Who Take Short Breaks
at Work
Are Far More Likely to Die of Cancer. Imagine that headline
popping up
while you are surfing the Web. According to a seemingly
impressive study
of 36,000 office workers (a huge data set!), those workers who
reported
leaving their offices to take regular ten-minute breaks during
the workday
were 41 percent more likely to develop cancer over the next five
years than
workers who don’t leave their offices during the workday.
Clearly we need
to act on this kind of finding—perhaps some kind of national
awareness
campaign to prevent short breaks on the job.
Or maybe we just need to think more clearly about what many
workers
are doing during that ten-minute break. My professional
experience
suggests that many of those workers who report leaving their

offices for
short breaks are huddled outside the entrance of the building
smoking
cigarettes (creating a haze of smoke through which the rest of
us have to
walk in order to get in or out). I would further infer that it’s
probably the
cigarettes, and not the short breaks from work, that are causing
the cancer.
I’ve made up this example just so that it would be particularly
absurd, but I
can assure you that many real-life statistical abominations are
nearly this
absurd once they are deconstructed.
Statistics is like a high-caliber weapon: helpful when used
correctly and
potentially disastrous in the wrong hands. This book will not
make you a
statistical expert; it will teach you enough care and respect for
the field that
you don’t do the statistical equivalent of blowing someone’s
head off.
This is not a textbook, which is liberating in terms of the topics
that have
to be covered and the ways in which they can be explained. The
book has
been designed to introduce the statistical concepts with the most
relevance
to everyday life. How do scientists conclude that something
causes cancer?
How does polling work (and what can go wrong)? Who “lies
with
statistics,” and how do they do it? How does your credit card
company use

data on what you are buying to predict if you are likely to miss
a payment?
(Seriously, they can do that.)
If you want to understand the numbers behind the news and to
appreciate
the extraordinary (and growing) power of data, this is the stuff
you need to
know. In the end, I hope to persuade you of the observation first
made by
Swedish mathematician and writer Andrejs Dunkels: It’s easy to
lie with
statistics, but it’s hard to tell the truth without them.
But I have even bolder aspirations than that. I think you might
actually
enjoy statistics. The underlying ideas are fabulously interesting
and
relevant. The key is to separate the important ideas from the
arcane
technical details that can get in the way. That is Naked
Statistics.
CHAPTER 1
What’s the Point?
I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon. Students will complain that
statistics is
confusing and irrelevant. Then the same students will leave the
classroom

and happily talk over lunch about batting averages (during the
summer) or
the windchill factor (during the winter) or grade point averages
(always).
They will recognize that the National Football League’s “passer
rating”—a
statistic that condenses a quarterback’s performance into a
single number—
is a somewhat flawed and arbitrary measure of a quarterback’s
game day
performance. The same data (completion rate, average yards per
pass
attempt, percentage of touchdown passes per pass attempt, and
interception
rate) could be combined in a different way, such as giving
greater or lesser
weight to any of those inputs, to generate a different but equally
credible
measure of performance. Yet anyone who has watched football
recognizes
that it’s handy to have a single number that can be used to
encapsulate a
quarterback’s performance.
Is the quarterback rating perfect? No. Statistics rarely offers a
single
“right” way of doing anything. Does it provide meaningful
information in
an easily accessible way? Absolutely. It’s a nice tool for making
a quick
comparison between the performances of two quarterbacks on a
given day. I
am a Chicago Bears fan. During the 2011 playoffs, the Bears
played the
Packers; the Packers won. There are a lot of ways I could
describe that

game, including pages and pages of analysis and raw data. But
here is a
more succinct analysis. Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler
had a passer
rating of 31.8. In contrast, Green Bay quarterback Aaron
Rodgers had a
passer rating of 55.4. Similarly, we can compare Jay Cutler’s
performance
to that in a game earlier in the season against Green Bay, when
he had a
passer rating of 85.6. That tells you a lot of what you need to
know in order
to understand why the Bears beat the Packers earlier in the
season but lost
to them in the playoffs.
That is a very helpful synopsis of what happened on the field.
Does it
simplify things? Yes, that is both the strength and the weakness
of any
descriptive statistic. One number tells you that Jay Cutler was
outgunned by
Aaron Rodgers in the Bears’ playoff loss. On the other hand,
that number
won’t tell you whether a quarterback had a bad break, such as
throwing a
perfect pass that was bobbled by the receiver and then
intercepted, or
whether he “stepped up” on certain key plays (since every
completion is
weighted the same, whether it is a crucial third down or a
meaningless play
at the end of the game), or whether the defense was terrible.
And so on.

The curious thing is that the same people who are perfectly
comfortable
discussing statistics in the context of sports or the weather or
grades will
seize up with anxiety when a researcher starts to explain
something like the
Gini index, which is a standard tool in economics for measuring
income
inequality. I’ll explain what the Gini index is in a moment, but
for now the
most important thing to recognize is that the Gini index is just
like the
passer rating. It’s a handy tool for collapsing complex
information into a
single number. As such, it has the strengths of most descriptive
statistics,
namely that it provides an easy way to compare the income
distribution in
two countries, or in a single country at different points in time.
The Gini index measures how evenly wealth (or income) is
shared within
a country on a scale from zero to one. The statistic can be
calculated for
wealth or for annual income, and it can be calculated at the
individual level
or at the household level. (All of these statistics will be highly
correlated
but not identical.) The Gini index, like the passer rating, has no
intrinsic
meaning; it’s a tool for comparison. A country in which every
household
had identical wealth would have a Gini index of zero. By
contrast, a country
in which a single household held the country’s entire wealth

would have a
Gini index of one. As you can probably surmise, the closer a
country is to
one, the more unequal its distribution of wealth. The United
States has a
Gini index of .45, according to the Central Intelligence Agency
(a great
collector of statistics, by the way).1 So what?
Once that number is put into context, it can tell us a lot. For
example,
Sweden has a Gini index of .23. Canada’s is .32. China’s is .42.
Brazil’s is
.54. South Africa’s is .65.* As we look across those numbers,
we get a sense
of where the United States falls relative to the rest of the world
when it
comes to income inequality. We can also compare different
points in time.
The Gini index for the United States was .41 in 1997 and grew
to .45 over
the next decade. (The most recent CIA data are for 2007.) This
tells us in an
objective way that while the United States grew richer over that
period of
time, the distribution of wealth grew more unequal. Again, we
can compare
the changes in the Gini index across countries over roughly the
same time
period. Inequality in Canada was basically unchanged over the
same
stretch. Sweden has had significant economic growth over the
past two

decades, but the Gini index in Sweden actually fell from .25 in
1992 to .23
in 2005, meaning that Sweden grew richer and more equal over
that period.
Is the Gini index the perfect measure of inequality? Absolutely
not—just
as the passer rating is not a perfect measure of quarterback
performance.
But it certainly gives us some valuable information on a
socially significant
phenomenon in a convenient format.
We have also slowly backed our way into answering the
question posed
in the chapter title: What is the point? The point is that
statistics helps us
process data, which is really just a fancy name for information.
Sometimes
the data are trivial in the grand scheme of things, as with sports
statistics.
Sometimes they offer insight into the nature of human
existence, as with the
Gini index.
But, as any good infomercial would point out, That’s not all!
Hal Varian,
chief economist at Google, told the New York Times that being
a statistician
will be “the sexy job” over the next decade.2 I’ll be the first to
concede that
economists sometimes have a warped definition of “sexy.” Still,
consider
the following disparate questions:
How can we catch schools that are cheating on their

standardized tests?
How does Netflix know what kind of movies you like?
How can we figure out what substances or behaviors cause
cancer, given
that we cannot conduct cancer-causing experiments on humans?
Does praying for surgical patients improve their outcomes?
Is there really an economic benefit to getting a degree from a
highly
selective college or university?
What is causing the rising incidence of autism?
Statistics can help answer these questions (or, we hope, can
soon). The
world is producing more and more data, ever faster and faster.
Yet, as the
New York Times has noted, “Data is merely the raw material of
knowledge.”3* Statistics is the most powerful tool we have for
using
information to some meaningful end, whether that is identifying
underrated
baseball players or paying teachers more fairly. Here is a quick
tour of how
statistics can bring meaning to raw data.
Description and Comparison
A bowling score is a descriptive statistic. So is a batting
average. Most
American sports fans over the age of five are already conversant
in the field
of descriptive statistics. We use numbers, in sports and

everywhere else in
life, to summarize information. How good a baseball player was
Mickey
Mantle? He was a career .298 hitter. To a baseball fan, that is a
meaningful
statement, which is remarkable when you think about it, because
it
encapsulates an eighteen-season career.4 (There is, I suppose,
something
mildly depressing about having one’s lifework collapsed into a
single
number.) Of course, baseball fans have also come to recognize
that
descriptive statistics other than batting average may better
encapsulate a
player’s value on the field.
We evaluate the academic performance of high school and
college
students by means of a grade point average, or GPA. A letter
grade is
assigned a point value; typically an A is worth 4 points, a B is
worth 3, a C
is worth 2, and so on. By graduation, when high school students
are
applying to college and college students are looking for jobs,
the grade
point average is a handy tool for assessing their academic
potential.
Someone who has a 3.7 GPA is clearly a stronger student than
someone at
the same school with a 2.5 GPA. That makes it a nice
descriptive statistic.
It’s easy to calculate, it’s easy to understand, and it’s easy to
compare across
students.

But it’s not perfect. The GPA does not reflect the difficulty of
the courses
that different students may have taken. How can we compare a
student with
a 3.4 GPA in classes that appear to be relatively nonchallenging
and a
student with a 2.9 GPA who has taken calculus, physics, and
other tough
subjects? I went to a high school that attempted to solve this
problem by
giving extra weight to difficult classes, so that an A in an
“honors” class
was worth five points instead of the usual four. This caused its
own
problems. My mother was quick to recognize the distortion
caused by this
GPA “fix.” For a student taking a lot of honors classes (me),
any A in a
nonhonors course, such as gym or health education, would
actually pull my
GPA down, even though it is impossible to do better than an A
in those
classes. As a result, my parents forbade me to take driver’s
education in
high school, lest even a perfect performance diminish my
chances of getting
into a competitive college and going on to write popular books.
Instead,
they paid to send me to a private driving school, at nights over
the summer.
Was that insane? Yes. But one theme of this book will be that

an
overreliance on any descriptive statistic can lead to misleading
conclusions,
or cause undesirable behavior. My original draft of that
sentence used the
phrase “oversimplified descriptive statistic,” but I struck the
word
“oversimplified” because it’s redundant. Descriptive statistics
exist to
simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.
Anyone
working with numbers needs to recognize as much.
Inference
How many homeless people live on the streets of Chicago? How
often do
married people have sex? These may seem like wildly different
kinds of
questions; in fact, they both can be answered (not perfectly) by
the use of
basic statistical tools. One key function of statistics is to use
the data we
have to make informed conjectures about larger questions for
which we do
not have full information. In short, we can use data from the
“known world”
to make informed inferences about the “unknown world.”
Let’s begin with the homeless question. It is expensive and
logistically
difficult to count the homeless population in a large
metropolitan area. Yet it
is important to have a numerical estimate of this population for
purposes of
providing social services, earning eligibility for state and

federal revenues,
and gaining congressional representation. One important
statistical practice
is sampling, which is the process of gathering data for a small
area, say, a
handful of census tracts, and then using those data to make an
informed
judgment, or inference, about the homeless population for the
city as a
whole. Sampling requires far less resources than trying to count
an entire
population; done properly, it can be every bit as accurate.
A political poll is one form of sampling. A research
organization will
attempt to contact a sample of households that are broadly
representative of
the larger population and ask them their views about a
particular issue or
candidate. This is obviously much cheaper and faster than
trying to contact
every household in an entire state or country. The polling and
research firm
Gallup reckons that a methodologically sound poll of 1,000
households will
produce roughly the same results as a poll that attempted to
contact every
household in America.
That’s how we figured out how often Americans are having sex,
with
whom, and what kind. In the mid-1990s, the National Opinion
Research

Center at the University of Chicago carried out a remarkably
ambitious
study of American sexual behavior. The results were based on
detailed
surveys conducted in person with a large, representative sample
of
American adults. If you read on, Chapter 10 will tell you what
they learned.
How many other statistics books can promise you that?
Assessing Risk and Other Probability-Related Events
Casinos make money in the long run—always. That does not
mean that they
are making money at any given moment. When the bells and
whistles go
off, some high roller has just won thousands of dollars. The
whole gambling
industry is built on games of chance, meaning that the outcome
of any
particular roll of the dice or turn of the card is uncertain. At the
same time,
the underlying probabilities for the relevant events—drawing 21
at
blackjack or spinning red in roulette—are known. When the
underlying
probabilities favor the casinos (as they always …
Predictably irrational
revised

and expanded
edition
The Hidden Forces
That Shape Our Decisions
Dan Ariely
Dedication
To my mentors, colleagues, and students—
who make research exciting
Contents
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
How an Injury Led Me to Irrationality and to the
Research Described Here
CHAPTER 1 - The Truth about Relativity
Why Everything Is Relative—Even When It Shouldn’t Be
CHAPTER 2 - The Fallacy of Supply and Demand
Why the Price of Pearls—and Everything Else—Is Up in the Air
CHAPTER 3 - The Cost of Zero Cost

Why We Often Pay Too Much When We Pay Nothing
CHAPTER 4 - The Cost of Social Norms
Why We Are Happy to Do Things, but Not When We Are Paid
to Do
Them
CHAPTER 5 - The Power of a Free Cookie
CHAPTER 6 - The Influence of Arousal
Why Hot Is Much Hotter Than We Realize
CHAPTER 7 - The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control
Why We Can’t Make Ourselves Do What We Want to Do
CHAPTER 8 - The High Price of Ownership
Why We Overvalue What We Have
CHAPTER 9 - Keeping Doors Open
Why Options Distract Us from Our Main Objective
CHAPTER 10 - The Effect of Expectations
Why the Mind Gets What It Expects
CHAPTER 11 - The Power of Price
Why a 50-Cent Aspirin Can Do What a Penny Aspirin Can’t
CHAPTER 12 - The Cycle of Distrust
CHAPTER 13 - The Context of Our Character, Part I
Why We Are Dishonest, and What We Can Do about It
CHAPTER 14 - The Context of Our Character, Part II

Why Dealing with Cash Makes Us More Honest
CHAPTER 15 - Beer and Free Lunches
What Is Behavioral Economics, and Where Are the Free
Lunches?
THANKS
LIST OF COLLABORATORS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ADDITIONAL READINGS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Introduction
How an Injury Led Me to Irrationality and
to the Research Described Here
I have been told by many people that I have an unusual way of
looking at
the world. Over the last 20 years or so of my research career,
it’s enabled
me to have a lot of fun figuring out what really influences our
decisions in
daily life (as opposed to what we think, often with great

confidence,
influences them).
Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet, only to
have
the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?
Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly
buying
things we don’t really need?
Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a one-
cent
aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin
costs 50
cents?
Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten
Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately
afterward)
than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce
dishonesty
in the workplace?
By the end of this book, you’ll know the answers to these and
many
other questions that have implications for your personal life, for
your
business life, and for the way you look at the world.
Understanding the
answer to the question about aspirin, for example, has
implications not only
for your choice of drugs, but for one of the biggest issues facing
our
society: the cost and effectiveness of health insurance.
Understanding the

impact of the Ten Commandments in curbing dishonesty might
help prevent
the next Enron-like fraud. And understanding the dynamics of
impulsive
eating has implications for every other impulsive decision in
our lives—
including why it’s so hard to save money for a rainy day.
My goal, by the end of this book, is to help you fundamentally
rethink what makes you and the people around you tick. I hope
to lead you
there by presenting a wide range of scientific experiments,
findings, and
anecdotes that are in many cases quite amusing. Once you see
how
systematic certain mistakes are—how we repeat them again and
again—I
think you will begin to learn how to avoid some of them.
But before I tell you about my curious, practical, entertaining
(and in
some cases even delicious) research on eating, shopping, love,
money,
procrastination, beer, honesty, and other areas of life, I feel it is
important
that I tell you about the origins of my somewhat unorthodox
worldview—
and therefore of this book. Tragically, my introduction to this
arena started
with an accident many years ago that was anything but amusing.
ON WHAT WOULD otherwise have been a normal Friday
afternoon in the

life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli, everything changed
irreversibly in a
matter of a few seconds. An explosion of a large magnesium
flare, the kind
used to illuminate battlefields at night, left 70 percent of my
body covered
with third-degree burns.
The next three years found me wrapped in bandages in a
hospital and
then emerging into public only occasionally, dressed in a tight
synthetic suit
and mask that made me look like a crooked version of Spider-
Man. Without
the ability to participate in the same daily activities as my
friends and
family, I felt partially separated from society and as a
consequence started
to observe the very activities that were once my daily routine as
if I were an
outsider. As if I had come from a different culture (or planet), I
started
reflecting on the goals of different behaviors, mine and those of
others. For
example, I started wondering why I loved one girl but not
another, why my
daily routine was designed to be comfortable for the physicians
but not for
me, why I loved going rock climbing but not studying history,
why I cared
so much about what other people thought of me, and mostly
what it is about
life that motivates people and causes us to behave as we do.

During the years in the hospital following my accident, I had
extensive experience with different types of pain and a great
deal of time
between treatments and operations to reflect on it. Initially, my
daily agony
was largely played out in the “bath,” a procedure in which I was
soaked in
disinfectant solution, the bandages were removed, and the dead
particles of
skin were scraped off. When the skin is intact, disinfectants
create a low-
level sting, and in general the bandages come off easily. But
when there is
little or no skin—as in my case because of my extensive
burns—the
disinfectant stings unbearably, the bandages stick to the flesh,
and removing
them (often tearing them) hurts like nothing else I can describe.
Early on in the burn department I started talking to the nurses
who
administered my daily bath, in order to understand their
approach to my
treatment. The nurses would routinely grab hold of a bandage
and rip it off
as fast as possible, creating a relatively short burst of pain; they
would
repeat this process for an hour or so until they had removed
every one of the
bandages. Once this process was over I was covered with
ointment and with
new bandages, in order to repeat the process again the next day.
The nurses, I quickly learned, had theorized that a vigorous tug
at the
bandages, which caused a sharp spike of pain, was preferable

(to the
patient) to a slow pulling of the wrappings, which might not
lead to such a
severe spike of pain but would extend the treatment, and
therefore be more
painful overall. The nurses had also concluded that there was no
difference
between two possible methods: starting at the most painful part
of the body
and working their way to the least painful part; or starting at the
least
painful part and advancing to the most excruciating areas.
As someone who had actually experienced the pain of the
bandage
removal process, I did not share their beliefs (which had never
been
scientifically tested). Moreover, their theories gave no
consideration to the
amount of fear that the patient felt anticipating the treatment; to
the
difficulties of dealing with fluctuations of pain over time; to the
unpredictability of not knowing when the pain will start and
ease off; or to
the benefits of being comforted with the possibility that the pain
would be
reduced over time. But, given my helpless position, I had little
influence
over the way I was treated.
As soon as I was able to leave the hospital for a prolonged
period (I
would still return for occasional operations and treatments for
another five

years), I began studying at Tel Aviv University. During my first
semester, I
took a class that profoundly changed my outlook on research
and largely
determined my future. This was a class on the physiology of the
brain,
taught by professor Hanan Frenk. In addition to the fascinating
material
Professor Frenk presented about the workings of the brain, what
struck me
most about this class was his attitude to questions and
alternative theories.
Many times, when I raised my hand in class or stopped by his
office to
suggest a different interpretation of some results he had
presented, he
replied that my theory was indeed a possibility (somewhat
unlikely, but a
possibility nevertheless)—and would then challenge me to
propose an
empirical test to distinguish it from the conventional theory.
Coming up with such tests was not easy, but the idea that
science is
an empirical endeavor in which all the participants, including a
new student
like myself, could come up with alternative theories, as long as
they found
empirical ways to test these theories, opened up a new world to
me. On one
of my visits to Professor Frenk’s office, I proposed a theory
explaining how
a certain stage of epilepsy developed, and included an idea for
how one
might test it in rats.

Professor Frenk liked the idea, and for the next three months I
operated on about 50 rats, implanting catheters in their spinal
cords and
giving them different substances to create and reduce their
epileptic
seizures. One of the practical problems with this approach was
that the
movements of my hands were very limited, because of my
injury, and as a
consequence it was very difficult for me to operate on the rats.
Luckily for
me, my best friend, Ron Weisberg (an avid vegetarian and
animal lover),
agreed to come with me to the lab for several weekends and
help me with
the procedures—a true test of friendship if ever there was one.
In the end, it turned out that my theory was wrong, but this did
not
diminish my enthusiasm. I was able to learn something about
my theory,
after all, and even though the theory was wrong, it was good to
know this
with high certainty. I always had many questions about how
things work
and how people behave, and my new understanding—that
science provides
the tools and opportunities to examine anything I found
interesting—lured
me into the study of how people behave.
With these new tools, I focused much of my initial efforts on
understanding how we experience pain. For obvious reasons I

was most
concerned with such situations as the bath treatment, in which
pain must be
delivered to a patient over a long period of time. Was it
possible to reduce
the overall agony of such pain? Over the next few years I was
able to carry
out a set of laboratory experiments on myself, my friends, and
volunteers—
using physical pain induced by heat, cold water, pressure, loud
sounds, and
even the psychological pain of losing money in the stock
market—to probe
for the answers.
By the time I had finished, I realized that the nurses in the burn
unit
were kind and generous individuals (well, there was one
exception) with a
lot of experience in soaking and removing bandages, but they
still didn’t
have the right theory about what would minimize their patients’
pain. How
could they be so wrong, I wondered, considering their vast
experience?
Since I knew these nurses personally, I knew that their behavior
was not
due to maliciousness, stupidity, or neglect. Rather, they were
most likely the
victims of inherent biases in their perceptions of their patients’
pain—biases
that apparently were not altered even by their vast experience.
For these reasons, I was particularly excited when I returned to
the
burn department one morning and presented my results, in the

hope of
influencing the bandage removal procedures for other patients.
It turns out, I
told the nurses and physicians, that people feel less pain if
treatments (such
as removing bandages in a bath) are carried out with lower
intensity and
longer duration than if the same goal is achieved through high
intensity and
a shorter duration. In other words, I would have suffered less if
they had
pulled the bandages off slowly rather than with their quick-pull
method.
The nurses were genuinely surprised by my conclusions, but I
was
equally surprised by what Etty, my favorite nurse, had to say.
She admitted
that their understanding had been lacking and that they should
change their
methods. But she also pointed out that a discussion of the pain
inflicted in
the bath treatment should also take into account the
psychological pain that
the nurses experienced when their patients screamed in agony.
Pulling the
bandages quickly might be more understandable, she explained,
if it were
indeed the nurses’ way of shortening their own torment (and
their faces
often did reveal that they were suffering). In the end, though,
we all agreed
that the procedures should be changed, and indeed, some of the

nurses
followed my recommendations.
My recommendations never changed the bandage removal
process on
a greater scale (as far as I know), but the episode left a special
impression
on me. If the nurses, with all their experience, misunderstood
what
constituted reality for the patients they cared so much about,
perhaps other
people similarly misunderstand the consequences of their
behaviors and, for
that reason, repeatedly make the wrong decisions. I decided to
expand my
scope of research, from pain to the examination of cases in
which
individuals make repeated mistakes—without being able to
learn much
from their experiences.
THIS JOURNEY INTO the many ways in which we are all
irrational, then, is
what this book is about. The discipline that allows me to play
with this
subject matter is called behavioral economics, or judgment and
decision
making (JDM).
Behavioral economics is a relatively new field, one that draws
on aspects
of both psychology and economics. It has led me to study
everything from
our reluctance to save for retirement to our inability to think
clearly during
sexual arousal. It’s not just the behavior that I have tried to

understand,
though, but also the decision-making processes behind such
behavior—
yours, mine, and everybody else’s. Before I go on, let me try to
explain,
briefly, what behavioral economics is all about and how it is
different from
standard economics. Let me start out with a bit of Shakespeare:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how
infinite in
faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in
action
how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty
of
the world, the paragon of animals. —from Act II, scene 2, of
Hamlet
The predominant view of human nature, largely shared by
economists,
policy makers, nonprofessionals, and everyday Joes, is the one
reflected in
this quotation. Of course, this view is largely correct. Our
minds and bodies
are capable of amazing acts. We can see a ball thrown from a
distance,
instantly calculate its trajectory and impact, and then move our
body and
hands in order to catch it. We can learn new languages with
ease,
particularly as young children. We can master chess. We can
recognize
thousands of faces without confusing them. We can produce

music,
literature, technology, and art—and the list goes on and on.
Shakespeare is not alone in his appreciation for the human
mind. In
fact, we all think of ourselves along the lines of Shakespeare’s
depiction
(although we do realize that our neighbors, spouses, and bosses
do not
always live up to this standard). Within the domain of science,
these
assumptions about our ability for perfect reasoning have found
their way
into economics. In economics, this very basic idea, called
rationality,
provides the foundation for economic theories, predictions, and
recommendations.
From this perspective, and to the extent that we all believe in
human
rationality, we are all economists. I don’t mean that each of us
can
intuitively develop complex game-theoretical models or
understand the
generalized axiom of revealed preference (GARP); rather, I
mean that we
hold the basic beliefs about human nature on which economics
is built. In
this book, when I mention the rational economic model, I refer
to the basic
assumption that most economists and many of us hold about
human nature
—the simple and compelling idea that we are capable of making
the right
decisions for ourselves.

Although a feeling of awe at the capability of humans is clearly
justified, there is a large difference between a deep sense of
admiration and
the assumption that our reasoning abilities are perfect. In fact,
this book is
about human irrationality—about our distance from perfection. I
believe
that recognizing where we depart from the ideal is an important
part of the
quest to truly understand ourselves, and one that promises many
practical
benefits. Understanding irrationality is important for our
everyday actions
and decisions, and for understanding how we design our
environment and
the choices it presents to us.
My further observation is that we are not only irrational, but
predictably irrational—that our irrationality happens the same
way, again
and again. Whether we are acting as consumers, businesspeople,
or policy
makers, understanding how we are predictably irrational
provides a starting
point for improving our decision making and changing the way
we live for
the better.
This leads me to the real “rub” (as Shakespeare might have
called it)
between conventional economics and behavioral economics. In
conventional economics, the assumption that we are all rational
implies

that, in everyday life, we compute the value of all the options
we face and
then follow the best possible path of action. What if we make a
mistake and
do something irrational? Here, too, traditional economics has an
answer:
“market forces” will sweep down on us and swiftly set us back
on the path
of righteousness and rationality. On the basis of these
assumptions, in fact,
generations of economists since Adam Smith have been able to
develop far-
reaching conclusions about everything from taxation and health-
care
policies to the pricing of goods and services.
But, as you will see in this book, we are really far less rational
than
standard economic theory assumes. Moreover, these irrational
behaviors of
ours are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic, and
since we
repeat them again and again, predictable. So, wouldn’t it make
sense to
modify standard economics, to move it away from naive
psychology (which
often fails the tests of reason, introspection, and—most
important—
empirical scrutiny)? This is exactly what the emerging field of
behavioral
economics, and this book as a small part of that enterprise, is
trying to
accomplish.
AS YOU WILL see in the pages ahead, each of the chapters in
this book is

based on a few experiments I carried out over the years with
some terrific
colleagues (at the end of the book, I have included short
biographies of my
amazing collaborators). Why experiments? Life is complex,
with multiple
forces simultaneously exerting their influences on us, and this
complexity
makes it difficult to figure out exactly how each of these forces
shapes our
behavior. For social scientists, experiments are like microscopes
or strobe
lights. They help us slow human behavior to a frame-by-frame
narration of
events, isolate individual forces, and examine those forces
carefully and in
more detail. They let us test directly and unambiguously what
makes us
tick.
There is one other point I want to emphasize about experiments.
If
the lessons learned in any experiment were limited to the exact
environment
of the experiment, their value would be limited. Instead, I
would like you to
think about experiments as an illustration of a general principle,
providing
insight into how we think and how we make decisions—not only
in the
context of a particular experiment but, by extrapolation, in
many contexts of
life.

In each chapter, then, I have taken a step in extrapolating the
findings
from the experiments to other contexts, attempting to describe
some of their
possible implications for life, business, and public policy. The
implications
I have drawn are, of course, just a partial list.
To get real value from this, and from social science in general,
it is
important that you, the reader, spend some time thinking about
how the
principles of human behavior identified in the experiments
apply to your
life. My suggestion to you is to pause at the end of each chapter
and
consider whether the principles revealed in the experiments
might make
your life better or worse, and more importantly what you could
do
differently, given your new understanding of human nature.
This is where
the real adventure lies.
And now for the journey.
CHAPTER 1
The Truth about Relativity
Why Everything Is Relative—Even
When It Shouldn’t Be

One day while browsing the World Wide Web (obviously for
work—not
just wasting time), I stumbled on the following ad, on the Web
site of a
magazine, the Economist.
I read these offers one at a time. The first offer—the Internet
subscription for $59—seemed reasonable. The second option—
the $125
print subscription—seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable.
But then I read the third option: a print and Internet
subscription for
$125. I read it twice before my eye ran back to the previous
options. Who
would want to buy the print option alone, I wondered, when
both the
Internet and the print subscriptions were offered for the same
price? Now,
the print-only option may have been a typographical error, but I
suspect that
the clever people at the Economist’s London offices (and they
are clever—
and quite mischievous in a British sort of way) were actually
manipulating
me. I am pretty certain that they wanted me to skip the Internet-
only option
(which they assumed would be my choice, since I was reading
the
advertisement on the Web) and jump to the more expensive
option: Internet

and print.
But how could they manipulate me? I suspect it’s because the
Economist’s marketing wizards (and I could just picture them in
their school
ties and blazers) knew something important about human
behavior: humans
rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don’t have an
internal value
meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus
on the
relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value
accordingly.
(For instance, we don’t know how much a six-cylinder car is
worth, but we
can assume it’s more expensive than the four-cylinder model.)
In the case of the Economist, I may not have known whether the
Internet-only subscription at $59 was a better deal than the
print-only option
at $125. But I certainly knew that the print-and-Internet option
for $125 was
better than the print-only option at $125. In fact, you could
reasonably
deduce that in the combination package, the Internet
subscription is free!
“It’s a bloody steal—go for it, governor!” I could almost hear
them shout
from the riverbanks of the Thames. And I have to admit, if I had
been
inclined to subscribe I probably would have taken the package
deal myself.
(Later, when I tested the offer on a large number of participants,
the vast
majority preferred the Internet-and-print deal.)

So what was going on here? Let me start with a fundamental
observation: most people don’t know what they want unless
they see it in
context. We don’t know what kind of racing bike we want—
until we see a
champ in the Tour de France ratcheting the gears on a particular
model. We
don’t know what kind of speaker system we like—until we hear
a set of
speakers that sounds better than the previous one. We don’t
even know what
we want to do with our lives—until we find a relative or a
friend who is
doing just what we think we should be doing. Everything is
relative, and
that’s the point. Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we
want runway
lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can
touch down
our wheels.
In the case of the Economist, the decision between the Internet-
only
and print-only options would take a bit of thinking. Thinking is
difficult and
sometimes unpleasant. So the Economist’s marketers offered us
a no-
brainer: relative to the print-only option, the print-and-Internet
option looks
clearly superior.
The geniuses at the Economist aren’t the only ones who
understand

the importance of relativity. Take Sam, the television salesman.
He plays the
same general type of trick on us when he decides which
televisions to put
together on display:
36-inch Panasonic for $690
42-inch Toshiba for $850
50-inch Philips for $1,480
Which one would you choose? In this case, Sam knows that
customers find it difficult to compute the value of different
options. (Who
really knows if the Panasonic at $690 is a better deal than the
Philips at
$1,480?) But Sam also knows that given three choices, most
people will
take the middle choice (as in landing your plane between the
runway lights).
So guess which television Sam prices as the middle option?
That’s right—
the one he wants to sell!
Of course, Sam is not alone in his cleverness. The New York
Times ran
a story recently about Gregg Rapp, a restaurant consultant, who
gets paid to
work out the pricing for menus. He knows, for instance, how
lamb sold this
year as opposed to last year; whether lamb did better paired
with squash or
with risotto; and whether orders decreased when the price of the
main
course was hiked from $39 to $41.
One thing Rapp has learned is that high-priced entrées on the

menu
boost revenue for the restaurant—even if no one buys them.
Why? Because
even though people generally won’t buy the most expensive
dish on the
menu, they will order the second most expensive dish. Thus, by
creating an
expensive dish, a restaurateur can lure customers into ordering
the second
most expensive choice (which can be cleverly engineered to
deliver a higher
profit margin).1
SO LET’S RUN through the Economist’s sleight of hand in slow
motion.
As you recall, the choices were:
1. Internet-only subscription for $59.
2. Print-only subscription for $125.
3. Print-and-Internet subscription for $125.
When I gave these options to 100 students at MIT’s Sloan
School of
Management, they opted as follows:
1. Internet-only subscription for $59—16 students
2. Print-only subscription for $125—zero students
3. Print-and-Internet subscription for $125—84 students
So far these Sloan MBAs are smart cookies. They all saw the
advantage in the print-and-Internet offer over the print-only
offer. But were
they influenced by the mere presence of the print-only option
(which I will

henceforth, and for good reason, call the “decoy”). In other
words, suppose
that I removed the decoy so that the choices would be the ones
seen in the
figure below:
Would the students respond as before (16 for the Internet only
and 84
for the combination)?
Certainly they would react the same way, wouldn’t they? After
all, the
option I took out was one that no one selected, so it should
make no
difference. Right?
Au contraire! This time, 68 of the students chose the Internet-
only
option for $59, up from 16 before. And only 32 chose the
combination
subscription for $125, down from 84 before.*
What could have possibly changed their minds? Nothing
rational, I
assure you. It was the mere presence of the decoy that sent 84
of them to the
print-and-Internet option (and 16 to the Internet-only option).
And the
absence of the decoy had them choosing differently, with 32 for
print-and-
Internet and 68 for Internet-only.
This is not only irrational but predictably irrational as well.
Why? I’m

glad you asked.
LET ME OFFER you this visual demonstration of relativity.
As you can see, the middle circle can’t seem to stay the same
size.
When placed among the larger circles, it gets smaller. When
placed among
the smaller circles, it grows bigger. The middle circle is the
same size in
both positions, of course, but it appears to change depending on
what we
place next to it.
This might be a mere curiosity, but for the fact that it mirrors
the way
the mind is wired: we are always looking at the things around us
in relation
to others. We can’t help it. This holds true not only for physical
things—
toasters, bicycles, puppies, restaurant entrées, and spouses—but
for
experiences such as vacations and educational options, and for
ephemeral
things as well: emotions, attitudes, and points of view.
We always compare jobs with jobs, vacations with vacations,
lovers
with lovers, and wines with wines. All this relativity reminds
me of a line
from the film Crocodile Dundee, when a street hoodlum pulls a
switchblade
against our hero, Paul Hogan. “You call that a knife?” says
Hogan

incredulously, withdrawing a bowie blade from the back of his
boot. “Now
this,” he says with a sly grin, “is a knife.”
RELATIVITY IS (RELATIVELY) easy to understand. But
there’s one aspect of
relativity that consistently trips us up. It’s this: we not only
tend to compare
things with one another …
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S H O R T E R T W E L F T H E D I T I O N
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S H O R T E R T W E L F T H E D I T I O N
KELLY J. MAYS
U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E V A D A , L A S V E G A S
B W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y N e w Y o r k ,
L o n d o n
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W. W. Norton & Company has been in de pen dent since its
founding in 1923, when William
Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton fi rst published
lectures delivered at the People’s

Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s
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The Norton Introduction to Lit er a ture / [edited by] Kelly J.
Mays,
University Of Nevada, Las Vegas. — Shorter Twelfth Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-393-93892-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lit er a ture—
Collections.
I. Mays, Kelly J., editor.
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Contents
Preface for Instructors xxv
Introduction 1
What Is Literature? 1
What Does Literature Do? 3
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer 4
What Are the Genres of Literature? 4
Why Read Literature? 6
Why Study Literature? 8
Fiction
FICTION: READING, RESPONDING, WRITING 12
Anonymous, The Elephant in the Village of the Blind 13

READING AND RESPONDING TO FICTION 16
Linda Brewer, 20/20 16
SAMPLE WRITING: Annotation and Notes on “20/20” 17
Marjane Satrapi, The Shabbat (from Persepolis) 20
WRITING ABOUT FICTION 31
Raymond Carver, Cathedral 32
SAMPLE WRITING: Wesley Rupton, Notes on Raymond
Carver’s
“Cathedral” 43
SAMPLE WRITING: Wesley Rupton, Response Paper on
Raymond
Carver’s “Cathedral” 46
SAMPLE WRITING: Bethany Qualls, A Narrator’s Blindness in
Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” 49
TELLING STORIES: AN ALBUM 53
Sherman Alexie, Flight Patterns 54
Grace Paley, A Conversation with My Father 67
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Grace Paley 72
tim o’brien, The Lives of the Dead 72
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UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT 85
1 PLOT 85
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Shroud 87
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues 93
Edith Wharton, Roman Fever 115
joyce carol oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have
You Been? 125
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Joyce Carol Oates 137
sample writing: ann warren, The Tragic Plot of
“A Rose for Emily” 139
INITIATION STORIES: AN ALBUM 145
Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson 146
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Toni Cade Bambara 152
Alice Munro, Boys and Girls 152
John Updike, A & P 163
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: John Updike 168
James Joyce, Araby 168
2 NARRATION AND POINT OF VIEW 174
Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado 178
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl 184
George Saunders, Puppy 186

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: George Saunders 192
jennifer egan, Black Box 193
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jennifer Egan 216
3 CHARACTER 218
William Faulkner, Barn Burning 225
Toni Morrison, Recitatif 238
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Toni Morrison 252
David Foster Wallace, Good People 253
MONSTERS: AN ALBUM 261
Margaret Atwood, Lusus Naturae 262
Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves 267
jorge luis borges, The House of Asterion 279
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jorge Luis Borges 282
4 SETTING 284
Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities 286
Margaret Mitchell, from Gone with the Wind 286
vi CONTENTS
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Alice Randall, from Wind Done Gone 288
Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog 290
Amy Tan, A Pair of Tickets 302
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Volar 316
william gibson, The Gernsback Continuum 318
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: William Gibson 327
SAMPLE WRITING: Steven Matview, How Setting Reflects
Emotions in Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” 329
5 SYMBOL AND FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE 334
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birth- Mark 339
A. S. Byatt, The Thing in the Forest 351
Edwidge Danticat, A Wall of Fire Rising 366
SAMPLE WRITING: Charles Collins, Symbolism in
“The Birth- Mark” and “The Thing in the Forest” 379
6 THEME 383
Aesop, The Two Crabs 383
Stephen Crane, The Open Boat 387
Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings: A Tale for Children 405
Yasunari Kawabata, The Grasshopper and the
Bell Cricket 410
junot díaz, Wildwood 413
CROSS- CULTUR AL ENCOUNTERS: AN ALBUM 431
Bharati Mukherjee, The Management of Grief 432
AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Bharati Mukherjee 445
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies 446

AUTHORS ON THEIR WORK: Jhumpa Lahiri 461
David Sedaris, Jesus Shaves 462
EXPLORING CONTEXTS 467
7 THE AUTHOR’S WORK AS CONTEXT:
FLANNERY O’CONNOR 467
THREE STORIES BY FLANNERY O’CONNOR 470
A Good Man Is Hard to Find 470
Good Country People 481
Everything That Rises Must Converge 495
CONTENTS v ii
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PASSAGES FROM FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S ESSAYS AND
LETTERS 506
CRITICAL EXCERPTS 510
Mary Gordon, from Flannery’s Kiss 510
Ann E. Reuman, from Revolting Fictions: Flannery O’Connor’s
Letter to Her Mother 513
Eileen Pollack, from Flannery O’Connor and the New

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