Superman and Paula Brown’s new snowsuit
Superman and Paula Brown’s new snowsuit is a shot story written by Sylvia Plath in 1955.

In the beginning of the text our narrator tells us that the story takes place in Winthrop [153, Ln. 2]. The story is set in the winter, in “the year the war began” [153, Ln. 2-3].
The world war two started in Europe in 1939, but it was first in 1941 the US entered the war. My guess is then, that the story takes place in the winter of 1941.
There are a lot of hints that tells us that it is war time, like: Uncle Frank is “waiting to be drafted” – he is waiting to join the army, the narrator wins a prize for drawing the best civil defense signs and Sheldon pretends to be nazi.
I did a research on our narrator Sylvia Plath, and I found out that this story is an episode from her childhood. Out of these information’s I must assume that Superman and Paula Brown’s new snowsuit must be a real story.
The story starts with an in medias res. From the first line to the last, do we have a flashback.
Everything in this story has been written in the first person. That means that we see through the eyes of our anonymous narrator, so the story is written with pronouns like I and me, and possessives like my and mine appear in the story. Our narrator gives us access to the events that takes place, and her feelings and thoughts about them. The narrator can easily seem loyal, and bring us readers on her side. Obviously this story could be retold from other characters, and then it would seem very different.
The story is full of word pictures like:
“The blood beat in my ears like a slack drum” and “wiped away like the crude drawings of a child”
There are also metaphors like: “hair tied up in sausage curls”, “The threat of the war was sleeping in everywhere” and “the colossal blackboard of the dark”.
In the story is says: “The airport was my Mecca, my Jerusalem”.
Mecca and Jerusalem are both holy places for Muslims and Jews. The airport is also some holy place for our narrator, and she hope one day to come to the airport for taking a look on the planes more closely.
It also says in the text: “a breathless sense of having tumbled like Icarus from the sky”.
Icarus was the son of a famous inventer in Greek myth, Daedalus. Kin Minos from Crete kept them as prisoner, so they made wings so Deadalus and Icarus could escape. But when they flew, Icarus flew too near the sun so that the wings broke or melted, so Icarus died during the escape.
This story reminds me of our narrator which “falls” from the “sky” but “lands” safely.
Flying is a symbol of possibility and imagination. The narrator dreams of flying, and feels like she is able to live her dreams. But at the end, she can’t fly any longer when superman and the airplanes vanish. It says that when we are dreaming of flying, we are daydreaming to escape the daily problems.
The protagonist is a girl on the age of 12 or 13 year old, because she is in the fifth grade on Annie F. Warren Grammar school. She is not like every normal girl in the fifth grades. Normally little girls like to play with dolls and act like princesses, but the protagonist like superman. She is a daydreamer, and often dreams of superman who teaches her to fly. I believe that she is a talented kid who does not want all the eyes on her, so she is a bit of an outsider. She reminds me of Icarus. They are both flying high, live life but do not know the real tough world we are living in, so they both are crashing. Compared to Icarus our protagonist survives the fall but with injuries.
Superman is a fantasy character, and no human being is like him. But our protagonist truly wants to believe that her Uncle Frank is superman. In the story we are being told that Uncle Frank is the strongest man David had known. As we see in the original superman stories, the hero spends most of his time living like an ordinary human being.
When the protagonist goes to the cinema, twist and turns her view of the world. She is being “brainwashed” by the movie, and not even superman could save her that night when she went to sleep. In that scene she found out that superman lives in a fantasy world, and she lives in the real world where the war is about to start.
It was hard for her to find out, but in the end where she talks to Uncle Frank she found out that Uncle Frank is her superman, and she had learn to distinguish between the real world and the fantasy world. She thinks it is okay to have a fantasy world as long as there is a balance between the two worlds.