‘The Bubble’ by Nancy Hale

The Bubble by Nancy Hale, 1954

The magic trick:

Masterly controlling, rewinding and slowing, time in the story

I imagine Hale working the remote control in this story. She starts by hitting the rewind button. We go back in time to our first-person narrator’s first pregnancy. She was 18, staying with her mother-in-law in Washington, D.C.

Hale then hits the slow-motion button on the remote. Time passes very slowly. The story moves frame by frame, as the narrator recalls the feelings and fears of that time in great detail.

Near the end of the text, Hale fast-forwards – first to the baby’s birth and then much further (two or three decades, perhaps) to her narrator’s present tense for the reflection on what it’s all meant that proves crucial to the story’s theme.

It’s not an especially original theme, nor is it a particularly innovative story.

Just an author in complete control of her craft (and the remote).

And that’s quite a trick on Hale’s part.

The selection:

It was an orderly, beautiful life. Breakfast was at eight, and Mrs. Tompkins dispensed the coffee from the silver repousse service before her, and herself broke the eggs into their cups to be handled by the butler to Miss Hammond and me. We had little pancakes with crisp edges, and the cook sent up rich, thick hot chocolate for me to drink, because I had not yet learned to like coffee. In those days, a thing like that did nothing to my figure.

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