“Thursday” by George Saunders

For the inaugural “How It Works (I Think),” I’ve chosen “Thursday,” a short story by George Saunders, which appeared in The New Yorker on June 12, 2023. (Please read the story first. “Thursday” by George Saunders. There are spoilers in what follows. Go ahead and click even if you’re not a subscriber; I understand The New Yorker allows some free articles per month.) I chose this story because Saunders is arguably one of our best contemporary American short story writers and because this blog is something of an homage to A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I also chose this story because, frankly, when I first read “Thursday,” I wasn’t sure I was making sense of it. It seemed like a very complicated story with an ending that felt beautiful and moving, but I didn’t understand why. Then I put on my short story nerd hat and re-read it, and re-read it again, more carefully. Here’s what I think Saunders is up to.

But first some short story analysis theory! Most good writers are trying to get their stories to work on two levels: what I call the “surface action” level and the “understory” level. To put it most simply, the surface action is what happens in the story and the understory is what it means. The understory is almost always meaningful in terms of the point of view character. The surface action unfolds in the story’s “present” (whether the story is written in the present or past tense), as opposed to “backstory” actions that have taken place in the past and are referenced or remembered by characters. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway et al also make a distinction between “story” and “plot” that roughly maps on to my surface action/understory distinction.

Other critics sometimes call these elements “plot” and “theme,” and those are useful terms, but I’ve invented the term “understory” instead of theme because it captures the way a thematic element or character issue actually goes through something very much like a plot arc itself, whereas a theme that can be extracted from a story tends to be more static. When you’re writing a story you have to sequence the understory element much like how you have to sequence surface action elements: to create drama and suspense about what a story is ultimately going to say about a theme or character issue. Often key building blocks of the understory are backstory moments or thoughts about a surface action event, or a bit of dialogue. In well-made stories, the exploration of a character issue changes and progresses in tandem with the surface action, generating an understory that swims below the ostensible action. To my way of thinking, a story doesn’t really work unless it puts a character issue or theme through a plot arc. Let’s start analyzing how “Thursday” works by looking at its surface action and its understory.

With “Thursday,” we might summarize the rather complicated surface action as follows: every Thursday, Gerard, a sad and lonely elderly man, goes to a virtual reality memory clinic for what Mrs. Rita Dwyer, his nurse’s assistant, suggests is a type of healing. The story opens with a totally immersive VR memory experience in which he is thirteen, spending blissful time outdoors with his younger sister, Clara, in which he imagines their generation as the goal and flower of civilization, the “healthy perfection that was us,” only to come back into the house to discover: “Dad pummelling Mom…, while Uncle Rod pummelled Dad…and Aunt Staci also, somewhat performatively, pummelled Mom.” While previous bad parenting is later alluded to (his parents laugh tipsily as he narrowly escapes a kitchen cabinet falling on him as a toddler), the implication is that this is the first time Gerard has experienced such violence; otherwise, we might not expect the optimism of his time on the lawn. Gerard tries to rationalize the pummelling “as a manifestation of our parents’ enviable lust for life,” but in retrospect this becomes a seminal moment for understanding that such violence will mark the way he and Clara deal with the world from then on.

The first major surface action twist is that these distressing memories are not in fact Gerard’s memories. They are the memories of David, brother of Clara, who, it turns out, is Rita’s (the nurse’s assistant’s) grandmother. Gerard learns this when Rita interrupts his VR memory session to see how it’s going. She confesses “something new is happening today.” David has recently died. Rita and her tech support person, Horace, have “legally obtained” David’s brain, which, according to the story’s sci fi rules and methods, allows them to insert David’s memories into Gerard’s consciousness. They want access to David’s memories because Clara has disappeared and her children and grandchildren don’t know where she is. Rita wants to find her, in part because Rita and Horace have recently become lovers and Rita wants their offspring to know their great grandmother, and Rita imagines that David’s late memories contain clues as to Clara’s current whereabouts. Rita sheepishly admits they should have asked Gerard’s permission to use his body as a way to access David’s memories.

Gerard is used to VR memory sessions in which he experiences a discrete hour of his own loving-but-strict Christian childhood. Today, however, Rita and Horace are trying to figure out how to immerse Gerard in a more recent memory of David’s that might contain Clara’s current address. Even as they admit to improperly using Gerard to explore David’s memories, they continue to do so, eventually over Gerard’s explicit objections. Fumbling their way, they accidentally send Gerard back to David at six, then two or three, then 35, before they successfully “fast forward” him to a recent time when Gerard as David sees Clara’s address on a letter from her. However, Gerard as David remembers that Clara has made him promise never to reveal her address to her children or grandchildren because Lewis, an abusive ex from whom Clara is hiding, would extract it from them.

Here is where Saunders’ surface action plot arguably shows a little strain: the address is discovered somewhat conveniently, and Lewis has only been abusive to Clara out of sight of her children and grandchildren, so they still trust Lewis. But given the degree of difficulty in putting over his amazingly inventive premise, it’s impressive that Saunders sticks the landing in this part of the story as well as he does.

At this point, Gerard has to choose whether to give Rita and Horace the address. Stung by Rita and Horace’s manipulation and moved by Clara’s predicament, he decides to honor David’s promise and act as if he hasn’t learned Clara’s address. Gerard informs Rita and Horace that in the future he’ll be seeking his VR memory experiences elsewhere. Rita and Horace reiterate what they did was wrong but hope they can remain on good terms. (By the way, Rita and Horace’s polite Midwestern manner contrasts hilariously with their selfish manipulations of Gerard.)

Gerard goes to Clara’s address. He wants to leave a note explaining what has happened to him and warning Clara that Rita and Horace are trying to find her. Before he can drop off this note, Clara herself comes down the sidewalk. Gerard decides to give her the note himself, and he hopes to befriend Clara. The story ends before they actually meet, with Gerard having thoughts of what their meeting might mean to him.

This is a complex and engaging surface action. The reader does have to pay good attention to grasp it, and I fault myself for not always doing so on my first reading, despite the many small repetitions and other moves Saunders makes to help a reader keep track of Gerard-as-David versus Gerard as himself and to follow the various time shifts. In fact, some of the story’s most brilliant descriptions visualize Gerard’s transition from VR David to IRL Gerard. The surface action also proceeds through a typical story arc, including a conflict between Gerard and Rita/Horace, a rising action, a decision, and a resolution in which Gerard wants to befriend Clara. But whether a good story works as a whole usually depends on how the story works through a major character issue, usually for the point of view character; completing a surface action plot arc is not enough, I would say. So we need to look at the understory for Gerard.

We learn in the story’s opening paragraphs that Gerard is unhappy. Rita asks how Gerard’s week has been: “’Same,’ I said. ‘Oh, gosh, sorry,’ she said.” The main business of the understory is exploring whether this unhappiness can be ameliorated. But first Saunders must unfurl the elaborate sci fi surface action through which this exploration will occur, and for a good chunk of the story Gerard’s character issue seems to recede as we learn about David’s difficult home life and see Gerard go in and out of the VR memory experience as Rita and Horace struggle to dial in a more recent memory. But along the way, through moments of exposition and backstory, we learn about Gerard and his own past.

We learn that he grew up on a wheat farm in Minnesota, raised by “exceedingly gentle ministers, who framed every picture I drew, incorporated my child-thoughts into their sermons, eschewed alcohol entirely, had never raised their hand to each other.” He goes to VR memory therapy “to bask once more in their fond, unconditional acceptance, to be young again, deeply immersed in one of those sacred early days on the farm.” Gerard grows up prim, proper, and aloof.

Here Saunders’ elaborate sci fi set-up begins to pay character and life-insight dividends: having experienced so much of David’s life as VR David, Gerard begins to see himself as David would, going so far as to use “I” pronouns to think of himself from David’s point of view: “but if anyone felt like judging me (David), such as, for example, him (Gerard), I (David) might just point out, all due respect, that he (Gerard) had always been cautious to a fault, had managed to push away, with his brittle sanctimony, anyone who’d ever entertained any idea of getting close to him.” Gerard’s lack of friends and romantic partners is why Gerard’s relatively full life as a translator of Christian texts into foreign languages has devolved in retirement into a sad, lifeless, lonely existence, which he tries to assuage through VR memory treatments.

Once this opposition is established between Gerard’s safe-and-clean-but-sad life as a moral prig and David’s messy life, wrestling, mostly unsuccessfully, with his troubled upbringing, Gerard’s understory drama becomes which way he will lean by the end of the story: clean or messy? Aloof or willing to be in touch with the “lust for life”? First, he leans clean: he does the right thing by (gently) standing up for himself with Rita and Horace and then by refusing to break David’s promise. But his experience as David looking at himself (Gerard) has also shown him that his tendency to judge others and his resulting standoffishness are not enough to make a happy life. So he is moved to seek and risk contact with Clara.

Gerard’s solution, the final event of his understory plot arc, is to imagine forging a new combination self (still morally clean but now more willing to have contact with the morally messy—in Gerard’s fastidious eyes, this is basically everyone else but especially a person who has experienced a lot of pummelling) via his anticipated relationship with Clara: “I (Gerard) would have what I sorely needed: a pal, a platonic confidante, someone I might, because of our long history with her, at least be somewhat able to tolerate. I (David) would have his (Gerard’s) body, a precious, life-filled body that, though old, still promised some number of good days ahead.”

By imaginatively blending with David, Gerard becomes a more complete person in the story’s last paragraph, with a renewed prospect for happiness: “Life (I felt, we felt) could hardly be sad, or over, if such sounds [the singing of happy children at a nearby lake shore] were still being made, and if, up a sidewalk, there could still come someone we had held dear for many years, who might, in what time was left, become both our sister for the first time and our sister again.”

The problem of Gerard’s sadness, announced in the opening paragraphs, has been ameliorated in these final paragraphs. Gerard’s character issue has more or less completed its movement from bad to better, through Gerard’s ability to find specific terms through which he can mix clean and messy aspects of life. The surface action has ended several paragraphs ago with the sighting of Clara; the understory concludes in the final four paragraphs with Gerard’s thoughts, during which the key meanings of the story are solidified.

This combination of surface action and understory in turn releases the reader into the fun part of interpretation. What is the story about? How does it resonate? To me the story seems to be an allegory about how the act of empathizing with another person—whether through reading, watching a movie, or having a VR experience of their memories—profoundly changes us. We identify so strongly that we absorb attitudes and experiences as if they happened to us; Gerard literally identifies, via I pronouns, with David. In the process, we become a sort of composite person, comprised of the people whose experiences we’ve entered into deeply. The resulting shift in mindset makes us capable of change and growth. Gerard understands someone else deeply enough to “tolerate” (his word) being with them, and his own sadness and loneliness and lifelessness recede somewhat (at least prospectively, in his imagination).

These conclusions can be grasped intellectually, and it’s also important to say they are also felt, with powerful emotion, in those evocative final words of the story: “our sister for the first time and our sister again.” There are many other emotionally evocative moments in the story. For example, at one point Gerard-as-David and Clara are in the basement, standing amidst their mother’s coats, “enjoying the odors of that bygone time.” In those odors is the vivid and irrefutable reality of a loved one and all of the experiences and emotions associated with that person. These are arguably among the most valuable aspects of reading this story. But, by some logic of art I’m not sure I can explain, those great moments ultimately won’t take or sink in if the story as a whole doesn’t quite work. Doubt will be cast on them. Making the understory work, I think, is necessary to make the whole story work, which provides the ultimate validation for each of its parts, even if those parts already seem awesome on their own.

Returning for a moment to the concept of theme, I want to note that this story contains several typical Saunders themes or tropes: death and what happens after we die (Lincoln in the Bardo and other works); a scenario in which cheerful but malignant powers orchestrate an alternative reality in a soul-destroying way (“Escape from Spiderhead,” “Pastoralia”); and a main character who shuns other people because of their flaws but then pays an emotional price (“The Barber’s Unhappiness”). The presence of these themes, as well as Saunders’ inimitable sense of humor, enrich the story, and also make it worth reading, but, as with the emotional element, they are not the key to why it works as a well-built story. Saunders’ careful management of the understory, on top of the story’s other qualities and virtues, is why it works as a story.

Or at least that’s what I think.

What’s your take? How do you read this story? Comments box below!