The Setting
The setting of the story is situated in the opening paragraphs. The narrative commences on a hot August Saturday afternoon on Vere Street in Lambeth. The neighborhood is an exercise homogeneity:
“Vere street, Lambeth, is a short, straight street leading out of the Westminster Bridge Road; it has forty houses on one side and forty houses on the other, and these eighty houses are very much more like one another than ever peas are like peas, or young ladies like young ladies.”
Work is No Better
For anyone who enjoys a little diversity in their existence, the peas in a pod cast to Vere Street would be quite maddening. Unfortunately, for Liza, existence does not improve—or indeed change much at all—once she leaves home and gets to work:
“All the morning Liza worked in a dead-and-alive sort of fashion, her head like a piece of lead with electric shocks going through it when she moved, and her tongue and mouth hot and dry.”
Capitalist Regret
Saturday nights are Liza’s opportunity to temporarily alter the numbing sameness of her routine. But as Thorstein Veblen predicted, an economy constructed upon finding satisfaction in buying things is doomed to fail because nothing is new again after it has first been used. After that first use, it’s just another thing to regret buying:
“The following day was Sunday. Liza when she was dressing herself in the morning, felt the hardness of fate in the impossibility of eating one's cake and having it; she wished she had reserved her new dress, and had still before her the sensation of a first appearance in it.”
A Doomed Affair
The love affair between Liza and Jim is doomed from the start. He’s married, first of all, and secondly: he’s a domestic abuser. There is no way that this story is going to end on the happily ever after. Their movement from flirtation to sexual activity and from sexual activity to tragedy is framed in language that is simultaneously literal and metaphorical:
“And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.”
Before the Death Rattle
Just moments before the death rattle which breaks it, a room that had been filled with conversation suddenly is stricken silent. In that silence is the last moment of mortality before Liza wheezes it out of herself for good:
“a heaviness seemed to fill the air like a grey blight, cold and suffocating; and the heaviness was Death. They felt the presence in the room, and they dared not move, they dared not draw their breath. The silence was terrifying.”
