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The Dream

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One day the narrator travels from New York to Petrograd and changes for a train in Vladivostok. At the station restaurant he meets a fat Russian man, who tells him the story of him and his wife. She is a possessive woman and, being jealous of everyone and everything around her husband, she makes his life unbearable. Once she has a dream that he kills her and tells him that. He starts to think about it a lot. Then she has this dream again. Finally, she dies the same way it has been in her dream, but it remains a mystery for the narrator if the Russian has had something to do with it.

The atmosphere in the story is dramatic and somewhat ironical, which is typical of Maugham. We face the irony at the very beginning, when the author portrays the Russian, creating a comical and grotesque image of him. For that purpose Maugham uses epithes, metaphors and antithesis combined. For instance, he metaphorically calls the nose of his character "a funny little button" and opposes it to his huge fat body. By this, the author prepares us to not consider the Russian as a real threat. That is why we as well as the narrator feel somewhat deceived, when at the end of the story the Russian appears having a look of "malicious cunning".

The ironical atmosphere is also felt when we see the scene at the station restaurant. The waiters are slow and unwilling to fulfil their duties, so our guests have to "persuade" them to bring them food. Eventually, they get the main course only after the Russian has told the whole story. In the same scene the author uses a hypebole as well ("his twentieth cigarette"), for the same reason - to show us how slow the waiters are. The author makes the Russian say the following words: "Since the revolution the waiting in restaurants has become abominable", which I think is a pun, because the word "waiting" in this context can be interpreted either as "serving" or as actual "waiting".

When it comes to the Russian's story, the atmosphere is different. It turns dramatic, but we can still observe some cases of irony. First of all, the whole lovestory is ironical. The narrator wonders how it is possible for a woman to feel passionate and possessive about such an ugly man ("the ugliest man" the narrator has ever seen - which is, obviously, a hyperbole - just for the sake of emphasizing). The author also uses a gradation here: "She was jealous not only of the women I knew, but of my friends, my cat, and my books.", because it looks ridiculous when someone is jealous of an inanimate object.

As for the dramatic part, here the author adds pressure to the situation by using anaphora and epiphora along with gradation: "She thought I hated her, she thought I would gladly be rid of her <...> I was capable of murdering her." He uses a simple repetition as well as inversion in the following sentence: "never, never had the idea come to me". All this, together with the Russian's elevated manner of storytelling, makes this part really dramatic, considering that it ends with a death.

To show that the story takes place in Russia the author uses some Russian words and realia, such as vodka, cabbage soup.

The title of the story is also very important. The word "dream" has two meanings: something that one can see while sleeping and something that one wishes really strongly. I assume that the Russian really wanted to kill his wife, despite all his excuses, because she obviously felt it. Dreams can show us what we are afraid of, and the Swiss woman was afraid of her husband. We do not know if he was honest telling the story to the narrator, but he could conceal some details - after all, he did not want people to know that it was him who killed her. On the other hand, he might not have this desire to kill her from the beginning, at least a concious one. But the fact that she kept repeating him that she thought he was going to kill her, put this unconcious desire into shape. It does not change anything, because even if she has made him to kill her, it still means he was able to do this.

So, I think the message of this story is that you need to trust your own feelings and you should pay attention to the work of your subconcious: it may tell a lot about you and the people around.
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