Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 8, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(3):349-365; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp027
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Young Boys and Old Lions: Fatalism in the Stories of Edward P. Jones
*Bryn Mawr College, English House, 101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2899, USA. E-mail: dtorday@brynmawr.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
There's a moment toward the end of "Old Boys, Old Girls," the most striking story in Edward P. Jones’ second story collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, that perhaps best encapsulates the particular brand of clairvoyance with which Jones’ third person narrators are frequently blessed.1 Caesar Matthews, a feckless murderer, con-artist and petty thief whom Jones has introduced in the story "Young Lions" in Lost in the City, has recently been released from jail. He has just finished serving a long sentence at Lorton, in Virginia, for the second-degree murder of a man named Antwoine Stoddard.
For the first six years Caesar is in jail, he goes through the variety of experiences a reader might expect for a murderer in jail. He meets up with two other murderers who know him by his reputation, one called Cathedral and one called Multrey Wilson. They advise him to establish