How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees…one's happiness, one's reality?" (6)
Eleanor seems to suggest that ghosts of the past are sometimes all one knows of their current reality—our past shapes our life in the present. This certainly seems to be the case for some of the story's characters. What kind conflicting notions of "reality" does the story draw out? Are their multiple different "realities" at play here?
Quote #2
He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sort of odd things about their experiences in Heaven. (11)
The old man talking to spirits clearly occupies a very different reality from the other characters. Yet, he also shares the external reality of the garden with them. Which reality is "real"? If we can't verify the presence of the spirits, does that make the old man's "reality" less authentic? What determines the validity of any given version of reality?
Quote #3
So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. (18)
The woman looks almost as crazy as the old man sounds. She's just chilling in her own world here, her own particular reality in which the other woman's words cease to matter. Is there a difference, then, between a character's "version of reality" and their "interior world"? Are these things fundamentally the same?