52 pages • 1 hour read
Liberation Day: Stories
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“Sparrow”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Sparrow” Summary
A narrator describes a woman named Gloria who works at a local grocery store. She is known in the community as Sparrow because she is slight and unassuming. Sparrow is described as a very agreeable, unopinionated person with little individuality or uniqueness. When she starts to fall in love with her colleague Randy, however, she realizes that she might need to develop a fuller sense of self in order to attract him. Sparrow attempts to form her own thoughts and opinions, and she tries to become more conventionally “girlish” through perfume and women’s magazines (134).
Randy adores his mother, who owns the store that he and Sparrow work in. Randy still lives at home, and the community suspect that his adoration for his mother is the reason he never married. Randy’s mother is described as a grumpy old woman, and she begins to bully Sparrow at work when she realizes that Sparrow has feelings for her son.
As Randy and Sparrow interact more, Randy begins to fall in love with her. Although Sparrow is still unopinionated and conforming, Randy enjoys this aspect of her personality, as he finds her agreeable and supportive. When Randy’s mother expresses her dislike of the relationship to Randy, it draws Randy and Sparrow even closer together.
Sparrow and Randy continue their agreeable relationship. To the bemusement of the community, they marry and begin a happy, content life together. They both continue to work at the store as a married couple, and eventually, even Randy’s mother begins to appreciate and respect the couple and their devotion to one another.
"Sparrow" Analysis
“Sparrow” is one of the shorter stories in the collection, and it revolves largely around the theme of Outward Appearances Versus Reality. It is narrated from the perspective of an unknown observer who is a member of the same community as Sparrow (Glenda) and Ricky, who begin a romantic relationship. As such, the narrator represents a communal “we,” or the local community members, who watch the events of the story unfold at a distance. Because of this narrative distance between the speaker and the subjects, there is a degree of assumption and speculation surrounding the events as they are told.
Sparrow is a highly agreeable woman with no unique characteristics or opinions of her own. To the surprise of the community, Ricky begins to return her affections—he enjoys her agreeableness and falls in love. The local town, and Ricky’s mother, are confounded by this relationship, because they cannot imagine how such a neutral, uninteresting woman could be in a devoted relationship. The narrator continues to express disbelief, then tentative acceptance, of the fact that Sparrow and Ricky become happily married. In the narrator’s suspicion over their romance, the dissonance between outward appearance and the reality of a situation is emphasized. Because of the narrator’s preconceptions about Sparrow and her personality, they are unable to imagine a reality in which she enjoys a happy, perhaps even complex, romance—but this seems to be exactly what she has.
The story is less about Sparrow and Ricky’s actual relationship than it is about the community’s perception of their love. That Sparrow and Ricky remain happy and devoted to one another proves their observers wrong and casts doubt on their—and the narrator’s—opinions on the couple. This suggests that the narrator doesn’t, or cannot, know Sparrow’s true self at all. As a result, the story questions humans’ sense of reality, and people’s sense of narrative fidelity more generally, because a reader’s only lens into its subject is from a speculative source who cannot look beyond their assumptions that are based on outward appearance.
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