The Japanese Quince | The Blackbird's Song
Kippen is an educator and specialist on British colonial literature and twentieth-century South African fiction. In the following essay, he examines the many symmetrical reflections in Galsworthy's story and argues that they, together, create a larger rhetorical mirror directed outward at the reader.
At first blush, Galsworthy's "The Japanese Quince" seems quite simple; however, the story's superficial simplicity is deceptive. Mr. Nilson, a well-to-do man of commerce walks out, one fine spring day, into the Garden Square adjacent to his home. He ruminates on spring, meets and converses with a neighbor indistinguishable from him in all but name, becomes self-conscious, and returns to his home. Though this summary fails to describe Nilson's concerns about his heart, which motivate his stroll, and the Japanese quince and blackbird at the story' s linear and gravitational center, it is...
[The entire page is 1341 words long]
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