In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Amy Hempel
- First Published: 1985
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: The 1970's
- Setting: Los Angeles, California
- Principal Characters: The narrator, Her dying friend
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
- Subjects: 1970’s, North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Friendship, Guilt, California, West, U.S., Fear, Death or dying, Funeral rites or ceremonies, Hospitals, Cemeteries
- Locales: Los Angeles, CA
The Story
The unnamed narrator, a young woman in her twenties, has come to visit her former college roommate, who is dying in a Los Angeles hospital. The friend asks the narrator to tell her useless stuff that she will not mind forgetting. Much of the story thus consists of meaningless bits of trivia told by the narrator; for example, that insects can fly through rain without getting wet and that no one owned a tape recorder in the United States before Bing Crosby did. The narrator also tells her friend that when scientists taught the first chimp to talk, it lied, and about a...
[The entire page is 1509 words long]
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