Live like a dog, alone
In the short story, Live like a dog, alone, by Fay Weldon, we get to get on a cab drive with the successful businesswomen Miriam. The time of the action lasts from half an hour to an hour depending on the drive’s duration. But even though we get to know these to characters well in the story. Miriam is the one we get to know the best. The narrator is a third-person narrator as you can see: ‘“But you can look at it another way,” she said, from the back of the cab.’(Page 8, line 11) But the perspective is from Miriam. Even though she isn’t a first-person narrator it is her thoughts and feelings we get to hear: ‘She wondered what he looked like.’ The cab driver’s thoughts aren’t known.
The short story starts in the middle of their conversation when the cab driver says he now lives like a dog, alone. The cab driver has low self-esteem and tells her how girls seek away from him like two identical poles on a magnet. He compares himself with a dog because dogs live by themselves he says. Miriam, as the carrying person she is, immediately feels like she has to cheer the taxi driver up. She tries to mention some other great animals that also wander about alone. She mentions lions, eagles and tigers. They are majestic, strong and proud animals. But while trying to cheer him up she also tries to defend herself. Even though she told the cabdriver she lived with her husband she too lives alone. She’s trying to convince herself that it’s okay to live on her own. That she can be success- and powerful.
Miriam is in her fifties, single and has heart problems. But still she had been voted Business Woman of the Year. Miriam has, unlike the cabdriver, put up a façade to protect herself. As told before she told the driver she lived with her husband, because she thinks the loneliness is a weakness and she want to be a strong independent woman.
Miriam feels like she has to cheer up the cabdriver: ‘She felt duty-bound to cheer him up.’(Page 8, line 13) But in her need of taking care of everyone else she forgets to take care of herself therefore her heart problems. Stress could be the cause of her heart problems. The cabdriver on the other hand openly tells her about how lonely he is and how he never will find a woman. ‘[…]take off that depressive sweater, put on a clean shirt and look cheerful and you’ll find no shortage of girls in the land.’(page 10, line 92) is what she thinks when he says what girls think about him. From her view at the backseat she only sees his dirty neck but no face. She gets irritated at him for not trying to look and be nice to girls, and just being sad and sorry for himself. So the two characters are each other’s opposites. She´s trying to look confident and strong and he just admits that he feels lonely. But they do share the same loneliness. Earlier when Miriam is having a had time mentioning animals who live on their own she mentions the mole. The mole as it says in the text an anti-social animal; it is blind and live under the ground. Miriam kind of does the same. She won’t admit to herself that everybody, animals as humans, need somebody to love. She closes her eyes and won’t see it.

In the end when the cabdriver turns around to look at her she sees that he actually doesn’t look that filthy: ‘His nose was straight, his eyes were dark and glowing and intimate.’(page 11, line 113) She predicts how it will end, she will ask him up to his apartment, they will get married, but eventually he will leave her again. But at this point, after the cabdriver tells her how he doesn’t believe that even moles live by themselves, she is starting to realize that she needs somebody to love. That is why the cabdriver doesn’t look that bad in the end. And that is why she says yes to him when he wants to come up for a cup of coffee even though she told him she had a husband waiting upstairs. She put away her weakness for loneliness and comes true. Loneliness is the main theme in this story, and how loneliness can happen for different people under different circumstances.