Lost in Yonkers Literary Elements

Drama, Comedy

English

Yonkers, New York, 1942, Grandma Kurnitz’s apartment, which is above her shop, Kurnitz’s Kandy Store.

No narrator

tense, comedic, dramatic, heartfelt, tragicomic

The protagonists are Jay and Arty, though an argument could be made that Bella is also a protagonist. The antagonist is Grandma Kurnitz.

Eddie must leave his sons with his mother for 10 months while he works in the South to pay off a large debt. The boys are introduced to the frustrations and upsetting experiences that come with living with their seemingly heartless, cold grandmother.

Bella confronts her mother about how she raised her and her siblings, and finally seems to get through to her about how Grandma's lack of love and emotional neglect has affected her children, but particularly Bella.

Bella’s threat to leave to her mother in Act I foreshadows that she actually will leave her mother’s house later in the play, even if only for a short period of time.

At the beginning of the third scene in Act I, Eddie writes the boys a letter and says he has to rest in his traveling because he got “plumb tuckered out.” Later at the top of Act II, we learn that Eddie has been hospitalized for exhaustion and was clearly downplaying his condition from his previous letter.

In the first scene of Act II, Louie tells Arty he has “moxie” and, when asked to define the word, “stands in a defiant position, in his body and in his face.” Later when Louie pays Jay the same compliment, Arty demonstrates the same definition for Jay. This imagery gives a visual description of the characteristic that develops in both Jay and Arty throughout the play and serves to show the audience how the brothers grow closer to manhood by the end of the play.

Grandma’s relationship with her family is a paradox. She pushes them to be strong because she is afraid of them dying and leaving her alone in the world. In doing so, however, she pushes them away from her emotionally, making it more and more likely for her to end up alone.

In Act II Scene I, parallelism can be found in the relationships between Jay and Arty, on the one hand, and Louie and Eddie, on the other. The scene begins with Eddie’s letter to his sons explaining that he is ill and recounting the disgusting soup his mother made him eat when he was sick. Just after the letter is read, Jay brings a fever-ridden Arty the very same soup Eddie wrote about, drawing similarities between the two characters. Later in the scene, Louie begins antagonizing Arty, prompting Jay to stand up for him and challenge his uncle, revealing that Louie was simply being hard on him to make Jay stronger like he himself had to become—much like Grandma Kurnitz did for her own children.

In Act II Scene I, Louie tells Jay their “conversation is deceased.”

In this play, Arty and Bella play as the comic relief characters— Arty with his witty one-liners and Bella with her eccentric, often ridiculous behavior and thought processes. Additionally, there are a number of monologues scattered throughout the play, usually by characters who are, in the moment, trying to get Grandma Kurnitz to see how her cold and tough behavior is hurting her family more than it is helping them. Bella, Eddie, Jay, and Arty all have monologues directed to her in this manner. In fact, Bella’s monologue towards the end of the play is the climax of the whole plot, causing the greatest change in her mother. Another important monologue is by Grandma Kurnitz in the first scene of the play when she denies Jay and Arty permission to stay with her, allowing the audience an insightful look at the characters' principles and setting up the conflict that will structure the rest of the play. Monologues in this play seem to fulfill the purpose of revealing an important trait to each character, whether it’s Eddie’s love for his late wife, Arty’s honesty, Jay’s bravery, Bella’s longing for a loving touch, or Grandma Kurnitz’s coldness.