IND AFF Sparknotes

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For the Love of Ones Country What would you do for love? Would you break up a marriage or assassinate an Archduke? In the short story “IND AFF” by Fay Weldon the narrator must make a choice on whether or not to continue her love affair while examining the Princip’s murder of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. The story is set in Sarajevo in Bosnia, Yugoslavia where the assassination took place. Through irony, symbolism and setting, Weldon uses the parallel between the narrator and Pincip to show that seemingly inconsequential actions of an individual can have great consequences. Weldon’s story is packed with irony. The author uses situational irony when the narrator says “He was supervising my thesis on varying concepts of morality …show more content…

Peter and the narrator “come all this way”(Weldon 173) to see the footprints of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his wife and the assassin Princip. When standing in the rain Peter can only see the two puddles, however the narrator “shivered for his disappointment”(Weldon 173) because she could see footprints in spite of Peter’s complaint. In this literary symbol the footprints symbolize their relationship and the consequences of their affair. The narrator can see all the effects and the possible consequences of their relationship while Peter is blind to them. Another literary symbol is their room at Hotel Europa. It is described as “small and dark and looked out into the well of the building- a punishment room if ever there was one.”(Weldon 176) The hotel room symbolizes the guilt and the retribution for having an affair with …show more content…

The narrator and her lover Peter travel to Sarajevo in Bosnia, Yugoslavia for a holiday to make sure what they have is the real thing. This is the same city where Princip shot the Archduke Ferdinand and the Archduchess, igniting the timber that started World War I. By setting the story in this same historic city, Weldon is drawing parallels between the Princip’s situation and the narrator’s. The narrator is struggling between what is moral and how her actions are going to affect everyone and everything around her. Similarly the Princip also had to decide whether or not to shoot the Archduke. On the other hand, Princip does decide to shoot the Archduke and Archduchess for the love of his country and the results are spending the rest of his life in prison. Through the setting, Weldon places the narrator in geologically in the same place and in the same mindset as Princip makes this huge

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