Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

Because she almost always ran instead of walking she cleared the steps with one long bound—like a deer, she thought in mid-air—and went in through the French doors.

Almost as if Natalie is narrating her own story, the main story, not just the detective story.

Natalie watching the morning from her bedroom window and making hasty notes about it on her desk pad,

Natalie writing the story.

“I don’t remember,” Natalie told him. “Of course you remember,” the detective said impatiently. “No one can live through such things and not remember them.”

At that time, of course, Natalie reflected with contentment, her life would be done.

Suicidal thoughts.

Sometimes, with a vast aching heartbreak, the great, badly contained intentions of creation, the poignant searching longings of adolescence overwhelmed her, and shocked by her own capacity for creation, she held herself tight and unyielding, crying out silently something that might only be phrased as, “Let me take, let me create.”

the gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.

The first to awaken, the first to come, misty, into the world, moving through an unpeopled country without a footstep, going up the mountains, touching the still-wet grass with her hands.

Almost a sort of God like describing. Remember her father calling himself God in the first section.

He had chosen to dress himself in a fuzzy tweed jacket and he looked very literary indeed; no amount of poise could forsake him in this jacket. It was almost equivalent to a brace of pistols and a pair of jackboots; Mr. Waite was arrayed for his own interpretation of a street brawl.

Verna sighed heavily. “My name used to be Edith,” she confided abruptly.

“Little Natalie, never rest until you have uncovered your essential self. Remember that. Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.”

“From too much love of living. From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving . .

The Garden of Porserpine by Swinburne.

Everyone only knows one ‘I,’ and that’s the ‘I’ they call themselves, and there’s no one else can be ‘I’ to anyone except that one person, and they’re all stuck with themselves and once they find out they’ve been tricked,

Perhaps in that little time I have grown in his mind and he is now talking to some Natalie he thought he had hold of by the arm.

Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to touch me?

“I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter,” she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, until, desperately, she said aloud, “I don’t remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened.”

because she so much desired to tell, that she wanted to tell even them, but because this was not a personal manifestation, but had changed them all in changing the world, in the sense that they only existed in Natalie’s imagination anyway, so that the revolution in the world had altered their faces and made their hearts smaller.

education, the youthful founders of the college had told the world blandly, was more a matter of attitude than of learning.

It might also be noted that the “original beams” having been found to need constant repair, plastic brick had been substituted wherever possible.

That's symbolism, if I've ever seen it.

“My name is Natalie Waite.” Is it my name? she wondered then, afraid for a minute that she had appropriated the name of the next girl, or of someone she had met slightly once and remembered only in the recesses of her mind which seemed called upon unreasonably to function now, socially, and without experience.

Continues theme of names and changing of names.

Another instance, she thought regretfully (or at least remembered later that she had so thought), of ritual gone to seed; the persecution of new students, once passionate, is now only perfunctory.

Could it be, she wondered tiredly, that a mask is no protection at all?”

She gave her name (was it her name?)

In the class named philosophy,

Name theme.

“This girl,” he said, his hand on Natalie’s arm,

The music teachr holds Natalie's arm just as the old man had in the first section.

“they want to pull us back, and start us all over again just like them and doing the things they want to do and acting the way they want to act and saying and thinking and wanting all the things they live with every day.