Nine Stories Lesson Plan

What is the importance of the orthopedic appliances shop in “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”? What could this shop symbolize?

The orthopedic appliances shop is the site of several important events in the story. In the first, the narrator becomes extremely depressed when he realizes, “I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bed pans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.” At the end of the story, another event takes place at the shop. The narrator is watching an employee change the mannequin’s dress, when he experiences an epiphany (“the sun came up and sped toward the bridge of my nose”). Afterwards,...