We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Uncle Julian

they were afraid of Blackwoods.

Mr. Elbert

Simile ouch extended

Mrs. Donell

Harrises

Haha

their flat grey faces with the hating eyes.

I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud.

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying.

Ewww. Sadistic. Sociopath? Question

Ewww, she’s the only one to try to relate.

Haha - questioning God from a purely solipsistic p.o.v.

there were not many things I could do to get back at them, but I did what I could.

“nice land to farm. Man could get rich, farming the Blackwood land.

Keep their land pretty well locked up, the Blackwoods do.”

I suppose the crack was there, like a finger pointing, from the time when the village was first put together out of old grey wood and the ugly people with their evil faces were brought from some impossible place and set down in the houses to live.

Fantasy creepy

Stella

the only one who managed to keep hold of any color at all.

when she put on a bright print dress it stayed looking bright for a little while before it merged into the dirty grey of the rest.

Jim Donell

Some of the people in the village had real faces that I knew and could hate individually;

Whenever I saw a tiny scrap of paper I was to remember to be kinder to Uncle Julian.

“Joe,”

Dunham,

his legs stretched out so I could not get past him and outside.

The spoon in his cup was still, but he was talking on.

An observation reminiscent of Benjy Compton in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Haha she can be witty. That’s what she should say to him.

I am living on the moon, I told myself, I have a little house all by myself on the moon.

Dissociation : detachment from physical and emotional experience. Note the moon passim.

Things on the moon were very bright, and odd colors;

Haha witty

the Harris boys

I thought, I am living on the moon,

They saw me at once, and I thought of them rotting away and curling in pain and crying out loud; I wanted them doubled up and crying on the ground in front of me.

how else could so many children learn so thoroughly?

Haha no clue about children - she’s afraid of them.

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight,

It was strange to be inside myself,

to be inside

I was hiding very far inside but I could hear them and see them

looking into her flat dull eyes

“Can’t you make them stop?” I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love.

Their tongues will burn, I thought, as though they had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires.

our father had given up any idea of putting his land to profitable use

our land was heavily wooded, and no one knew its secret ways but me.

their unfailing offers of refuge.

When I was small I thought Constance was a fairy princess.

that morning.”

set the library books on the shelf where they were going to stay forever.

Helen Clarke

Mrs. Shepherd

Mrs....