The Hourglass

The short stories "A Distant Episode" and Blaise's "A Class of New Canadians" both shares certain similarities and dissimilarities. These two short stories, one being the adventure of a linguistic professor abroad and the other, the life of an English teacher in Montreal, Quebec share a strong connection. To follow, there will be a detailed and through look at the two characters' lives, they're psychological aspects - their state of mind, and how they intend to curb reality into a certain form of fantasy that would rather seem plausible to their own eyes and fulfill their needs and desires.

An obvious similarity between the linguistic professor and the English teacher is that of their occupation, both being linguists - living off language. The two characters share pretty much the same ethnical background, being from the Westernized part of the world and having lived in the same kind of society. The linguistic professor went on a trip within the Middle East - a completely different world with a different culture. The English teacher runs off to Canada, Quebec precisely; this is an important thing since Quebec is a French-speaking province. "When stopped on the street for directions, he would answer in French or accented English." (Blaise, p.96) This clearly gives an image of arrogance about Dyer, the English teacher and how insulting and rude his act was. In Bowles' "A Distant Episode", the story read: "He paid him an enormous tip, for which he received a grave bow." (Bowles, p.122) This demonstrates that the professor is undoubtedly thinking he can buy other's respect thus making him think he is a superior being. This behavior is also seen with the English teacher who thinks of himself as a form of divinity, "He was a god two evenings a week [...]" (Blaise, p.96) and who assumes that his students love him: "They love me [...] I love myself." (Blaise, p.96) The idea of assumption plays a great role in analyzing these two characters. Both the linguistic professor and the English teacher, throughout the stories, base their lives and ideas on assumptions: the English teacher assumes that he is loved by everyone and assumes on and on that his ideas are right and if others don't agree, they are the ones that are wrong. This certainly applies just as much for the linguistic professor who assumed that after couple of years, Hassan Ramani (who he considered a friend) would still be sitting in the coffee house waiting for him to come and visit him. In a sense, the professor is once again imposing himself, as to what a great guy he is.

Another fundamental portion of the analysis is contained within the image and idea of betrayal. This is the portion where the two characters are put in a dissimilar situation. During his teaching time at McGill University, the English teacher has noticed that many of his students are using Montreal and his class, more specifically, as a gateway to leave Montreal to go to a different location (like the States) to continue their lives there. And Dyer does not feel the same way: "How could you? [...] What's wrong with you anyway? South Africa is fascist. Australia is racist." (Blais, p.99) The idea that one of his students might leave Montreal has obviously made the English teacher furious. His anger combine with his arrogance and ego forced him to betray his students just as he did with Mayor. "Dyer felt himself abused by the very people he wanted so much to help. It had to end someplace." (Blaise, p.101) As far as the situation goes for the linguistic professor overseas, it is more about how he was betrayed rather than him doing anything. He decides to go about looking for special boxes and asks for help. He gets exactly the help he asked for but does not quite get the boxes he was venturing after. Instead he is brutally attacked and detained. These two situations (the