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Average Waves in Unprotected Waters | Introduction

‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters,’’ first published in the February 28, 1977, edition of the New Yorker, is one of Anne Tyler’s most anthologized short stories. Themes that appear in all of Tyler’s writing are encapsulated in the life of the story’s protagonist, Bet Blevins, whom the reader meets on the day she is to institutionalize her mentally handicapped son. These themes include: the family and the role of the individual in relationship to the family, parenting, memory, absent fathers, and identity and self-discovery. Published the same year Tyler published her seventh novel, Earthly Possessions, the story grapples with the complex web of characteristics that define an ordinary life. Like many of Tyler’s characters, Bet Blevins is an ordinary American. She endures the hardships she has been dealt and does so as a ‘‘normal’’ person may be expected to endure. Through Blevins and others, Tyler proves that most events in life are complex and nuanced, which often clouds the delineation between what is heroic and what is simply normal. Tyler is well known for her ability and propensity for writing about ordinary people, a trait she shares with one of her greatest literary influences, the southern writer Eudora Welty.

Tyler developed an affinity for the short story form in the early 1970s, as it allowed her to balance the demands of motherhood and writing while her children were young, and in the latter half of the decade, she published stories in many magazines, including the Ladies’ Home Journal, the New Yorker, and McCall’s. Though there is not an edition of Tyler’s collected short stories in which ‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters’’ appears, the story can currently be found in several anthologies, including the ninth edition of The American Tradition in Literature, edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins and published by McGraw-Hill.

Average Waves in Unprotected Waters Summary

‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters’’ begins at first light on the day Bet Blevins, the story’s protagonist, is to institutionalize her mentally handicapped son, Arnold. At the age of nine, Arnold has become too difficult for Bet to manage. In the shabby, one-room apartment, Bet wonders, as she prepares Arnold’s things and dresses him one last time, if he understands what is happening and if she is truly making the right decision. As they leave the crumbling apartment building, Mrs. Puckett, a kindly neighbor who is crying, stops Bet and gives her cookies for Arnold, but he runs off without acknowledging the woman who has baby-sat for him since his birth.

After taking a bus from their apartment, Bet and Arnold arrive at the train station. Bet has purchased gum, which she gives to a nervous Arnold. As the train leaves, he becomes calmer and falls asleep. While Arnold sleeps, Bet remembers him as a younger child. She remembers her husband, Avery, who left a few weeks after Arnold’s mental disability was diagnosed. She determines that she and Avery married too young, against her parents’ wishes. She wonders if the gene that caused Arnold’s disability came from Avery or from her. She speculates that it came from her because, ‘‘she... » Complete Average Waves in Unprotected Waters Summary