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A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters"
A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters"
A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters"
Ebook35 pages24 minutes

A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 15, 2016
ISBN9781535818971
A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters"

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    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters" - Gale

    1

    Average Waves in Unprotected Waters

    Anne Tyler

    1977

    Introduction

    Average Waves in Unprotected Waters, first published in the February 28, 1977, edition of the New Yorker, is one of Anne Tyler's most anthologized short stories. Themes that appear in all of Tyler's writing are encapsulated in the life of the story's protagonist, Bet Blevins, whom the reader meets on the day she is to institutionalize her mentally handicapped son. These themes include: the family and the role of the individual in relationship to the family, parenting, memory, absent fathers, and identity and self-discovery. Published the same year Tyler published her seventh novel, Earthly Possessions, the story grapples with the complex web of characteristics that define an ordinary life. Like many of Tyler's characters, Bet Blevins is an ordinary American. She endures the hardships she has been dealt and does so as a normal person may be expected to endure. Through Blevins and others, Tyler proves that most events in life are complex and nuanced, which often clouds the delineation between what is heroic and what is simply normal. Tyler is well known for her ability and propensity for writing about ordinary people, a trait she shares with one of her greatest literary influences, the southern writer Eudora Welty.

    Tyler developed an affinity for the short story form in the early 1970s, as it allowed her to balance the demands of motherhood and writing while her children were young, and in the latter half of the decade, she published stories in many magazines, including the Ladies' Home Journal, the New Yorker, and McCall's. Though there is not an edition of Tyler's collected short stories in which Average Waves in Unprotected Waters appears, the story can currently be found in several anthologies, including the ninth edition of The American Tradition in Literature, edited by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins and published by McGraw-Hill.

    Author Biography

    Anne Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, a chemist, and mother, Mahon Tyler, a

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