Jayne Ann Phillips, "Bluegill"


1. As in Donald Barthelme’s "See the Moon?", a mother's address to her unborn child drives this story, and yet a sense of expectancy is tinged by dark imagery: "Fanged one, sucker, hermaphrodite." Describe the mood of this particular story, and how it affirms and contradicts traditional perspectives on pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.

2. "I believe you are male," the narrator asserts, "will I make you husband, uncle, brother?" How important is the gender of the unborn child to the narrator? Why does the narrator presume it is male, and how does that shape the narrator's sense of the future? Where is the father? What is the narrator's relationship to the town? What themes does Phillips touch upon concerning gender, and how does she manage to explore these issues with depth?

3. The impressionistic language of "Bluegill" is one of its most distinctive elements. What kind of story structure does this language create? Compare this structure to that of works by Burroughs and Barthelme and other examples of compressed language. How does this language succeed in rendering the character of the narrator, and in what ways does it appear to contradict that very image?