The Spectator

     I am a bit iffy about this story. I only liked it towards the end because I feel like the beginning dragged on. I was pretty detached in the beginning and was confused as to what was going on. Who is Magda? Why are they having dinner together? However, as I continued reading the story began to progress and there was more action that grabbed by attention.

     I think the author did want us to think that Hugo is weak. I feel like she was trying to show that when you’re rich like Hugo, you’re pretty disconnected from the problems of the world “God, it was so moving, listening to Mozart’s music on those cold summer nights and thinking of Hitler a few miles away…” (pg.203) Yes, they are somehow affected but at the end of the day their money can get them out of a lot of situations.  

     Hugo did, however, somehow progress as a character throughout the story. When it was him who was personally in the midst of the war, who was attacked by a torpedo in the apparently neutral water, he began to see the war in a far different outlook. “How often, before going to bed, had he casually crumpled the newspaper he had been reading, in which there were stories about air raids, torpedoes, or fires – oh, so many of them that he wearied of pity?” At this point he realized that his perspectives on global issues were “unfair”.