The Shadow Lines Lesson Plan

What do you think is the purpose of including the story about Ila’s yearbook and her supposed boyfriend?

There seem to be two primary purposes of this story. One is to build Ila’s character. She is wealthy and pretentious with a tendency to embellish her life to make it appear more glamorous than it is. For example, the narrator points out that, according to Ila, her “closest friends were always the most beautiful, the most talented, the most intelligent girls in the school. She would point them out to me in the pictures of picnics and fancy-dress dances” (22). Then, the guy she called her boyfriend, the narrator describes as looking like an American film star, and Ila...