The Lame Shall Enter First | Setting

The story opens in the kitchen, appropriate because food as metaphor characterizes all three main characters. We first meet Norton stuffing himself with peanut butter and ketchup smeared on a piece of chocolate cake, trying to satisfy an emotional emptiness he feels as a result of his mother’s death. He vomits all that he consumes because it is love, not food, that he needs. By the end of the story, in contrast, Sheppard “had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself.” Rufus at first prefers to find food in...

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