White Angel

The narrator’s language is frequently nonliteral, employing metaphor, similes, and other figures of speech to convey the emotions and qualities of the characters. Bobby describes how his mother’s “nerves run through this house. She can feel dust settling on the tabletops, milk starting to turn in the refrigerator” (6). He also says of her facial expression, “[she] looks at things as if they give off a painful light” (6). Describing his father, he remarks, “His face has been worn down by too much patience” (7). Later, when he’s angry at the party and fighting the order to go to bed, he says his father is holding him “like the live bomb I am” (12). These moments, as well as other figurative language and imagery in the story, convey the emotional worlds of the characters. This language also reveals the personality of the narrator, who is observant and at turns poetic in his descriptions of the world. Bobby’s figurative language also becomes vivid when he’s intoxicated. He feels like the world around him is alive, and he feels he can see past the walls and into rooms he doesn’t occupy: “Electrical wires curl behind the plaster, hidden and patient as snakes” (4). Wires are not snakes, nor can they be patient as snakes, so this description is clearly figurative.

Personification is the ascription of human qualities to nonhuman objects. Cunningham’s narrator uses personification to animate the story’s imagery. In the cemetery, “[d]ead leaves and a yellow M&M wrapper, worried by the wind, scrape the marble floor” (2). The phrase “worried by the wind” makes the imagery more meaningful, as though the wrapper itself is alive. This detail, which occurs when Bobby is under the influence of drugs, helps the reader imagine seeing the world while under the influence of psychoactive drugs. While he is high, he describes the view from a window: “Outside the snow skitters, nervous and silver, under streetlamps,” and “[r]anch-style houses hoard their warmth” (4). Describing the snow as “nervous” and the houses as “hoarding” their warmth makes the scene itself seem alive. It’s as if there is something intentional about the houses and the snow, as if they are in opposition to each other, one hoarding light and the other skittering away nervously. While this language highlights Bobby’s altered perceptions, it also shows that Bobby is an observer; he notices small details, and he has an eye for beauty. At other points in the story, personification conveys the emotion of a scene. When he sees Carlton and his girlfriend having sex in the cemetery, Bobby describes their clothes as an “uncertain jumble,” a phrase that conveys his confusion at what he’s seeing.

Setting is the time and place of a story, but the setting of “White Angel” has a greater symbolic function and lends itself to exploring themes—the proximity of death and life, fate, and the reckless optimism of youth. The story takes place in the 1960s in Cleveland, and the time period contextualizes Carlton’s choices and attitudes. He sees himself as part of the 1960s counterculture (exemplified by Woodstock, which he mentions often), and he experiments with drugs and alcohol, taking his kid brother along with him in his illicit activities. The 1960s setting also informs the character psychology of the boys’ parents, who are the product of a prior generation. They were influenced by the Second World War and by the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Bobby’s mother lost her first husband in the war, and she sings old 1940s songs to soothe herself when she gets angry. In some ways, because the parents lived in a prior era, they can’t embrace the ideas of a new generation—until they are at the party and Carlton’s friends play The Rolling Stones. This is, of course, interrupted by Carlton’s death, which symbolically undermines his optimistic dream of revolution and generational unity.

The family’s house is adjacent to a cemetery, and this is also important. Instead of respecting the space or avoiding it, Carlton and Bobby turn the cemetery into the site of their experimentation with the adult world through their use of drugs and alcohol. It is where Carlton and his girlfriend first have sex, and where the boys store their alcohol. The way they use the cemetery suggests an irreverence for death, an attitude that underlies Carlton’s risk-taking behavior. The cemetery is also the home of the eponymous white angel statue. Carlton runs from the cemetery toward the house at the end when he crashes into the door, and he is buried there in the end, close to the house. Throughout the narrative, Carlton belongs to the cemetery; he comes into the house bringing “the smell of the cemetery with him” (7). The cemetery echoes the theme that life and death, love and pain, are always in close proximity. At any time, disaster can strike, even if young people like Carlton believe they are invincible.