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

of the story the narrator is at a library returning some books, when she encounters her ex-husband that walks by and she says: “Hello my life”. Her husband replies with a bitter attitude
“What? What life? No life of mine”.
The ex-husband egoistically makes it seem like he does not care or want to seem like 27 years of marriage happened. He evidently just “wants” to take out his ex-wife completely from his life memory to be able to move on. However, that is not as easy as it seems and rather impossible to forget and erase her out of his mind.
The ex-husband could be described as someone that is still immature and more interested in the materialistic aspects of life.

“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

time.
The exhusband by blaming their failed marriage merely on her, has demonstrated to be somewhat inconsiderate and irresponsible because he was not thinking about the mistakes he made and his wrong actions that also contributed to their marriage dissolution. He was not willing to take any of the blame from the consequences. The ex-husband lets her know that the he’s finally getting the sailboat he has alwas wanted and he later complains on how she “didnt want anything.” And then he says, “as for you, its too late. You’ll alwas want nothing.” This comment was hurtful and left her as she said, “like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, half-way to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.”
Later what the narrator finds out is that she in fact does want something and that something is nothing materialistic like a sailboat. She says: "I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center. I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one.” Her wants are things that can’t be bought with money, they are intangible.
Once the narrator has paid what she owed at the book store, she immediately regains the kindness of the librarian.

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

person.
The narrator notices that morning, the same morning she took the books back to the library that “the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives." With this she saw how time was passing and she wanted to do something different. Her returning back those books could be seen as something more symbolic, since it is easier just to return them than being an “effective citizen” but just the same as the ex-husband gave a down payment for his sailboat which is the thing he wants, the lady returning those books it could be interpreted as her part of down payment to become that person she wants to be.