¶ … protagonist of Mary Morris' short story "The Lifeguard"
The most notable thing about Mary Morris' short story entitled "The Lifeguard" is the way that the story makes an adolescent and largely undefined character a powerful, first person narrator. This is especially extraordinary in a tale with only one scene of truly wrenching external action. The rest of the narrative is mostly a series of observations, through the watchful but mostly bored eyes of the lifeguard. Morris creates a sense of drama and progression by structuring the short tale along a series of contrasts, first in terms of the lifeguard's place in life against the older inhabitants he watches, then regarding the lifeguard's relative youth and mobility vs. The other character's age and stasis, and finally between the main character's unfulfilled youthful, sexual desires and the other character's unfulfilled adult desires for different and better lives.
Morris, by making the main character's body the focus of the narrative early on, creates an immediate physical juxtaposition between the lifeguard and the summer people whom he watches, guarding over their lives and livelihoods. From the beginning, as the tale is set in summer, and by the bodies of water where human bodies are the main focus of the eye, the physical appearance and life of the characters holds sway. Josh Michael's, the lifeguard's appearance, stands in contrast to all of the other characters, but particularly the older characters of the narrative, most of whom are long past their physical and sexual prime.
The first extended physical character portrait is not of the main lifeguarding character, but of one of the characters he frequently observes over the course of his daily...
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