Short Story Analysis: Wants By Grace Paley

“Wants” is a short story by Grace Paley that talks about the idea that life is much more than just having some simple assets or items that really wouldn’t mean much after our time has come. Sometimes trying to look for things that really mean something and that you are willing to make a change for, seem the hardest things to find and they are not always found in materialistic things, sometimes you have to look really deep inside to find your real wants. Different points of view, ways of thinking, and interests in life tend to drift some of our closest ones apart if they don’t seem to fit in our needs and necessities. This important factors and descriptions are exactly what happened to the two characters in this short story.

At the beginning

“In many ways, as I look back, I contribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertram’s to dinner”. By him saying this, the narrator argued the reasons why she couldn’t have them for dinner and writes: "That's possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began. We didn't seem to know them anymore." Her perspective starts as a simple day and a social gathering, but then it rapidly increases to long periods of time and important dates like their child’s birth and the beginning of war. When she puts it this way, staying with the books for eighteen years seems like a short period of

Her past debts are forgiven in exactly the same degree that her ex-husband refuses to forgive her. By her doing this, the librarian sees her as a “different person” and this adds to her wants of being a better and a more efficient citizen. The narrator could repeat if she wanted the same mistake of not returning the books as she did for the same eighteen years, after all she “doesn’t understand how times passes.” By checking out the same books, it seems as she is trying to follow the same decisions she made before, but it is possible that she is doing this to give herself a second chance and to be able to do things right, to prove herself that she was starting to do something about the issue of becoming a different