Stolpestad

Stolpestad

Stagnation is a not an uncommon feeling to most people. It is the sense of being stuck in aroutine, a place, a family, a life. It is the realization that the majority of our time is spent doingthe same thing: Getting up in the morning, going to work and hating it, returning home, goingto bed simply to rinse and repeat the whole process until the day you die. The worst part ofstagnation is that it is almost impossible to break free from. The familiar way to work, thatyou’ve trotted so many times before, has become quicksand and it will not let you go. WilliamLychack’s short story, “Stolpestad”, is about this exact feeling and is named after the maincharacter, a policeman, who is called in to put down an injured dog for a boy and his mother.In the evening, the father to the boy shows up at Stolpestad’s doorstep to tell him that the dogsurvived his attempt at killing it, and that the family had to call in a vet to finish the job. Thismight seem like a very specific and odd story but, in fact, its themes and moral can be appliedto any urbanite whose life is nothing but a rerun.The coffee shops, the liquor stores, laundromats, police-, fire- and gas stations make up thesetting for the story, and they are introduced as being all there is to Stolpestad’s dull life1. Hisentire existence seems to have become as monotonous as the “long slow lazy afternoons ofsummer”2, and he has to define himself through a place instead of having an actual identity.Stolpestad never expresses any verbal discontent with how his life has turned out, but hisactions say more than a thousand words: Instead of returning home to his wife and childrenafter a long day of work, he finds comfort at the bottom of one too many pints in a local pub.This seems to be part of his regular schedule seeing that his wife, Sheila, knows exactly whereto call to inform him of the fact that the boy from earlier is currently at Stolpestad’s housealong with his father. A pretty clear picture of the main character is...

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