"The Carpet" by Poul Watts.

Essay by derdenmarkCollege, UndergraduateA, October 2005

download word file, 7 pages 4.5 2 reviews

Downloaded 26 times

"The Carpet" is an English short story written by Poul Watts and printed in 1969. This story is very much in chronological order. The story's amount of time is about the time you take to read it. So it's very simple and accessible for everybody to read. We are introduced to a little boy, who stays anonymous throughout the story. He is confused and insecure with his own life and how he should behave. He endures with some problems. These are reflected through the carpet and divided into 3 different sections, which I will tell you more about later in the essay. This boy has challenged himself to get from the top of the stairs to the front door following the carpet without touching certain spots. On the whole this is basically what this short story is about, but of course when you read be-tween the lines something lies beneath the surface.

This story takes places in a very rich environment. The family consisting of a mother and her son have at least one storey with an apparently expensive carpet leading down the stairs to the entrance. Another argument for how rich this family are is the tennis lawn we hear about. "A tremendous carpet. Bigger than the tennis lawn." (Line 17-18).

The boy we hear about seems to be a perfectly normal kid, who apparently had been out playing and had got a cut. He finds this scab on his kneecap fascinating. The humans' ability to convalesce is to him an admiring thing. And he bumps into the well-known temptation, to pick the scab of the cut. The scab lands on the carpet, which is the next thing to immediately catch the boy's attention. He is quickly fascinated again and we are told in specific details how this carpet...