DORDT COLLEGE
Stephen Dobyns:
Connection of Worldviews
and Literary Works
Core 180
Professor Mary Dengler
Nic Oak Enerson
10/18/2012
1
Nicolas Enerson
Core 180
Professor Mary Dengler
October 18, 2012
Stephen Dobyns: Connection of Worldviews and Literary Works
Stephen Dobyns has produced mass amounts of literature across all different
genres, but he sees himself as a poet. Dobyns’ honors and awards include a Lamont Prize,
a Melville Cain Award, a National poetry Series prize, several Pushcart Prizes, and a
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Two of the stories in Eating Naked (a collection of his short stories) have been selected
for Best American Short Stories. He has also had two novels made into movies. Ashber
writes, “In much of his poetry and some works of non-genre fiction, Dobyns uses absurd
vehicles to introduce more profound meditations on life, love, and art. He shies neither
from the low nor from the sublime, and all in a straightforward narrative voice of reason”
(Ashber). We see that “absurd vehicle” and those “profound mediations” in two stories –
“Kansas” and “A Happy Vacancy.” In those stories, we also see that even though some
would assume that his mother, a history professor, and his father, involved in politics and
region, would have have made a powerful statement in the boys consciousness; leading
him to believe that action has consequences, life has meaning, and that the behavior of
individuals should serve humanity, such was not the case. Stephen Dobyns does not
believe in God or that there is a God that can be known. He is troubled by the idea that
human life could have no meaning, and his works show his belief that nothing can be
known for certain (Unger).
2
In the short story “Kansas,” Stephen Dobyns tells how one boy’s journey through
life cost him his own life. The story is about a young college student who has hitchhiked
his way from Oklahoma to Kansas so that he could go to the “Summer School” and
eventually go to New York to become a famous pianist. During one segment of his
journey, he gets picked up by a farmer who is on mission to kill his cheating wife and her
companion. This moment changes this boy’s life forever: He has just been riding beside a
man with gun who was out to kill his wife. This was during the Great Depression; during
that time the stress could have been causing many people to act irrationally. Then the boy
is dropped off in town and left to continue his journey. The boy sat and listened for a
gunshot but the sound was never heard. The boy was left wondering what happened to
the man and his wife for the rest of his life. He keeps his promise to the farmer and does
not tell the police or anyone about that day, but he still wonders if the man killed this
wife. He wonders why the man stopped to pick him up; should he have done something
different, been braver and intervened? The boy is burdened by the decision that he made
that day for the rest of his life. He could have tried to save the farmer’s wife by
comforting the farmer or telling the police, but he was too afraid of what the outcome
would be. We are led to believe that the boy’s decision not to talk about the incident to
anyone until he is on his own death bed will now have the same lasting effect on his son,
who watches him die and hears his final words. All the boy could do was think about
what happened to him that day for the rest of his life. He made it an inner conflict by
holding it inside. The boy had become so troubled and distracted by his own questions
that he grew up to be a teacher, then a minister, and never fulfilled his dreams as a pianist
as he had planned.
3
In another short story by author Stephen Dobyns, “A Happy Vacancy,” a pig falls
from the sky and kills a self-important poet. This self-important poet is Harriet Spense’s
husband, and the story is told from Harriet Spense’s point of view. People then begin to
mock Harriet; they make pig noises around her and cannot hold in their laughter when
they realize she is the wife of the man who was crushed by a falling pig. Harriet’s kids
also become deeply depressed and decide to drop out of college, change their last name,
and move to California. Harriet soon takes a leave from teaching and starts to seriously
question her life. She then moves to Ann Arbor, MI, and finds a job at a hospice.
It is during her time as a hospice care giver that she begins to rediscover what
casual is. One day when she is talking with a patient she asks him “what the funniest
recent thing they could think of was” (Dobyns, “A Happy Vacancy”). The patient replies,
"was something I read about last fall. A fellow was walking across the street in Boston
and a pig fell out of the air and crushed him… I mean, I got to die here in this darn bed.
Why couldn't I have been killed by a pig falling out of the sky? Nobody would forget
about it. I'd be famous forever” (Dobyns, “A Happy Vacancy”). This man that the patient
is referring to was Harriet’s husband, yet this event results in laughter between the two.
For Harriet the situation is a revelation: “In fact, it is the sound of the world disappearing
as all the content is sucked from our heads, to be replaced--briefly, oh, too briefly--by a
happy vacancy. And doesn't this sustain us? Doesn't it provide the strength to let us bear
up our burden and continue our mortal journey?” (Dobyns, “A Happy Vacancy”).
Even in the strangest of situations, in his short stories, we can see that Stephen
Dobyns is able to implement his morals and his direct approach to life. One thing is for
sure: when reading Stephan Dobyns writings, the reader can never expect what is going
to happen next. For example, the story of “Eating Naked” starts with the character Bob
4
Frankenmuth hitting a deer. Before he can get the deer off of the road, another truck
comes and has to swerve to miss the deer, and the driver ends up crashing her truck. The
girl that crashes her truck, Laura Spalding, was rushing to her boyfriend’s house because
Chuckie, her boyfriend, had a gun and was going to kill himself. Now that Laura’s truck
is unable to be driven, she is going to ride over to Chuckie’s house with Bob, who has
offered to take her. First, they must load up the dead deer so that Bob’s wife can cook it
later. When they get to Chuckie’s house, they somehow get the idea that they should
cook up the deer. Bob and Chuckie stay out and gut the deer, and Laura goes inside to set
the table. Bob convinces Chuckie that it is a bad idea for him to kill himself and that
Chuckie needs to be more open toward change. Bob then lets us in on why he has chosen
to help this random girl and stay for dinner with a man that wants to kill himself. Bob
says, “we had one sort of life and now she wants another and I don't feel there's enough
room for me in the new life” (Dobyns, “Eating Naked”). Bob then goes on to explain how
he has made a living fixing things up and making things work. Then when they sit down
for dinner, Bob has a few drinks and explains how this in a special occasion.
Bob then suggests that they “eat naked” (Dobyns, “Eating Naked”). At first
Chuckie and Laura look at him as if he is crazy, but then Laura decides that she wouldn’t
mind. So Laura, Bob, and Chuckie all begin to take off their clothes. Bob notices many
physical features on Laura and is slightly sexually attracted to her. Then they all sit down,
say prayer (although none are religious), and start eating the venison they have cooked on
the grill. Bob then makes a comment to Chuckie that this is way better than being dead.
Soon after Bob makes his comment, Laura begins to choke on a piece of venison. Bob
then,
5
dragged Laura to her feet. Standing behind her, he linked his hands under her
breastbone. Then he heaved hard. She struggled against him, still choking. He
heaved again. He was afraid of breaking a rib, of giving her internal injuries. His
penis was pushed against her buttocks, and Bob could feel himself getting an
erection. He was shocked by this. He heaved again… Bob yanked back a fifth
time, and the venison lodged in Laura's throat broke free. She gasped for breath”
(Dobyns, “Eating Naked”).
After that moment, Bob recalls in his mind how he was pressed up against her and the
mixture of passion, desperation, and fear. Afterward he sits admiring the curtains on the
wall: “They seemed to follow a pattern, but he could understand no pattern… It had
significance yet also seemed without significance” (Dobyns, “Eating Naked”).
Later in Bob’s life he would recall the shadows on the wall and the evening at
Chuckie’s house. In the closing lines of the short story, Bob talks about the lesson and
message he interpreted from that evening: “It was a way of making sense of the surprise,
the sudden change in the evening's direction, or what he had thought had been its
direction… like a message rendered in a language of which he had no understanding”
(Dobyns, “Eating Naked”).
As one can see, these are not happy stories. Often they are unpredictable and
unusual; nonetheless, they usually conclude with a clearly expressed moral
generalization. The conclusion they seek to provide is not just conclusion of plot but a
conclusion of inference and meaning, that life can change direction, and change us. There
are many connections that can be made between the moral generalizations in the stories
and how these generalizations often agree with his personal views and background. Many
6
of Dobyns’ moral generalizations are opposite of the way his parents would have wanted
to see things, but that does not hold him back (Wilhelmus).
Dobyns has never been the type of person to let failure define him. For example,
in the story of “Kansas,” Dobyns is expressing that a person should not ever be too
overwhelmed by one event in life, and that if there is something that is holding us back,
we should talk about it and express our emotions and not let them control us from inside.
In Dobyns’ life, he faced many setbacks but not to let them define him. For example,
Dobyns was badly suited for a traditional education setting but did manage to graduate in
1959. After high school he went to college where he found himself very interested in
literature and Aristotle’s Poetics, but reading still was a challenge for him. He then fell
into a depression, fell behind in classes, and had to drop out of the program. Dobyns
continued to move through his challenges, and six months later he was enrolled at Wayne
State College, where he finished his bachelor degree of arts in four years. Dobyns’ early
struggles with reading are also reflected in his current work today, as he tends to write
simply and directly. He doesn’t have to write his stories simple and direct, but doing so is
great way for him to get his message across to the many different reading levels of the
audience (Unger).
We also see Dobyns’ history and moral views reflected in “A Happy Vacancy.” In
this story Dobyns is trying to get across the idea that nothing should be taken too
seriously. At the end of the story the main character, Harriet, has seen that she doesn’t
always have to take what happened to her husband so personally; if she sees the situation
from an outsider’s point of view, being squashed by a pig that fell from the sky is a very
odd and funny way for a person to die. If Dobyns had taken his life as seriously as Harriet
and her husband had, he most likely would not have made it through grade school. He
7
constantly had his peers and teachers disappointed in his efforts, and even when he went
through depression, but was able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and he was able
to stay light hearted and become the successful writer he is today (Unger).
In the story “Eating Naked” you see his moral view shine though greatly. It starts
when none of his characters are religious, just as he has chosen to be unreligious in his
life. When he is using lines like, “They seemed to follow a pattern, but he could
understand no pattern… It had significance yet also seemed without significance”
(Dobyns, “Eating Naked”), you see a strong connection to his worldviews. Bob suggests
that a message is there, but he cannot understand it. Dobyns worldview was believed to
have been shaped by Paul Tillich, who studied with Dobyns’ father. Dobyns believes that
there could be a God out there and that there could be a certain order to things, but we
human cannot know it. The connection between his worldview and his messages in his
writing seems to be strong (Wilhelmus).
Stephen Dobyns writes with a very simple style that is very direct. Even though his
stories can be a bit absurd at times, he always sets up his stories to show a direct moral
messaged at the end. His stories almost always reflect his worldview about how one can
know nothing for certain. His stories are usually set up so that what seems to happen out
of total accident may have lasting impact on life. He seems to worry about how his
stories can provide us with brightness in an otherwise unclear world (Wilhelmus).
Stephen Dobyns may be most known for his poetry, but he has shown that he can be a
profound short story author. He uses his talents to engage the reader by always throwing
curveballs and never allowing the reader to guess what will happen next. His morals and
worldviews are clear through his writings while he provides a sufficient message on how
to triumph in life.
8
Works Cited
Ashbery, John. "Stephen Dobyns : The Poetry Foundation." Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d.
Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stephen-dobyns>.
Dengler, Mary. Class Lecture. Responding to Literature. Dordt College, Sioux Center,
Iowa. 09 September 2012.
Dobyns, Stephen. "A Happy Vacancy." The Southern Review. 30.3 (1994): 442. Print
Dobyns, Stephen. Eating naked: stories. lst ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.
Print.
Unger, Leonard, A W. Litz, Molly Weigel, and Jay Parini. American Writers: A
Collection of Literary Biographies. New York: Scribner, 1974. Print.
Wilhelmus, Tom. "The Hudson Review." Hudson Review. 53.4 (2001): pp. 693-699.
Print. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3852637 >.