Dec 23, 2009

Elbow Room | Themes

Race

Race is the most important theme explored in "Elbow Room," though the story's view of U.S. racial divisions lacks the kind of heated rhetoric or violent extremism that often surrounds the subject in literature. For the most part, the opposition to Virginia and Paul's interracial marriage comes in subtle ways. The narrator does mention strangers, children, who shout offensive racial slurs at Paul, but this is handled in a dispassionate way: the characters who are black and are used to being pelted with such insults hardly notice the word that Paul is called, just his...