Analyse af 'After You, My Dear Alphonse'

“After You, My Dear Alphonse” is a short story written by Shirley Jackson. It was published in 1943 in “The New Yorker”, which is an American magazine that is filled with reports, reviews, essays, satire and fiction published since February 17th, 1925. The editor of “The New Yorker” is David Remnick, who is a journalist and an author.

Shirley Jackson was born in the year of 1916 and died in 1965 and was an American lady. She was a fiction writer, who mostly wrote horror and mysterious works. Her stories are set against realistic, common place background. She was very popular in her lifetime.

Mrs. Wilson does not know how to behave, when she meets Boyd, therefore the theme in this essay are ignorance and the fact of being prejudiced. Her ignorance has the effect that she is prejudiced to Boyd, because he is a so-called negro. The title of the essay “After You, My Dear Alphonse” is pretty ironic, because it is Johnny, Mrs. Wilsons’ son, who says it to Boyd. In Mrs. Wilsons’ eyes, it should have been the other way around, since she and her son are white. She has gotten the idea that all colored people are poor, so she offered to help Boyd’s family by giving them close, that they do not use anymore. She also wants to make sure that Boyd eats a lot. In that way, readers begin to think of her as a racist, but her ignorance makes her prejudiced. The way she thinks of colored people are generally primitive, and she thinks that it is normal, to treat colored people that way and that every white family treats a colored human like the way she does. Readers get an example of that, when Mr. Wilson thinks that Johnny makes Boyd carry the wood. She is afraid that Johnny is using Boyd, but that is not the case.