A Day in the Museum
This is a story about a man sitting in a museum looking at one specific painting: the Stubbs chestnut horse. Doing this, he talks with an older man of near sixty years old about a girl in the museum. This girl reminds the older man about the feeling of rejection in his teen years.
The main character is telling the story from his own point of view, as he is the narrator of the story. He is a first person narrator, who does not comment on the characters and the action in an objective way. An example of this is when the girl jokes about the horse in the painting and walks away, just to go back, when she “stared at the horse, which she must have felt she had affronted by her laughter” (page 5 line 6). Of course, the narrator does not know why she comes back to the horse; this is just his guess of what she is thinking. This affects the readers, since we do not get to know the thoughts and feelings of the other characters.
At the beginning of the story, the old man tells a younger man about Stubbs the painter and about the horses he painted. But the young man seems restless and he is not interested in listening to the old man. By his exit, he ends up insulting the older man, who does not understand why the young man is not willing to learn anything about Stubbs. Stubbs and the painting of horses seems to mean a great deal to the older man, so he gets insulted, not only by being left, but also because of the fact that the younger man rather wants to go to the French eighteenth century than spending time looking at one of the older man’s favourite paintings. By describing the scene like this, the narrator makes us sympathize with the older man. This is the first place in the story where the old man is described in a piteous way.
Suddenly, the atmosphere of the room changes by the entering of a group of young schoolgirls. Everybody in the room,