What Is The Theme Of The 5: 22 By George Harrar

George Harrar is a fiction writer who has won a variety of valued such as Best American Short Stories, the First Prize, Certificate of Merit and Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature. He has written short stories like: “The Lake Region Poetry Club”, “A Perfect Reputation” and “The 5:22”. This last story was written in October 1998, and then published in The Best American Short Stories in 1999. The story can be enjoyable to read since it’s written in an understandable way; and even though it is easy to follow, it has some contradictions that makes you feel a bit confused and makes the character not believable.
The story is placed between the 80’s and the 90’s, and its main character is called Walter Mason. He can be described as a single

47-year-old man who has a specialty on executing experiments in a machine vision. He is also a fan of doing research and collecting Impossible Objects. For more than a year Walter and a woman saw each other’s faces at 5:22 at the train station. She always covered most of her skin and wore a colorful scarf around her head. One day at the train station the wind removed her scarf and when he looked at the woman he saw that she was missing an ear. When they made eye contact he stared at her in a rude way and he rolled his eyes. He was mad at her because apparently, she didn’t accept her imperfection and she was using a scarf all this time to cover her missing ear. After this scene happened, she went missing for weeks; and here is where the contradiction between the character personality and his acts begins.

In the story it says “To another man, he supposed, she might be considered mysterious, and thereby interesting. But Walter disliked mystery “. But ever since the woman went missing Mason did not do anything else than think about her disappearance. He would fill his mind and make any kind of excuses to provide reasoning to her missing days, making him do things against his personality and acting like another person. He would also ask the bus driver and stop in the shops by the station to ask about the woman with the missing ear. Too much for someone who does not like mystery.
Walter is also described as a boring person who stick to his daily routines, but the woman disappearance changed that. While being on his journey to find her, Mason did not have any transportation to go back to Lincoln, so he decided to walk. He started to track the rail lines which led him back to Lincoln and he walked between them. But the weird thing is that he had fun while doing so. He would stretch his steps to land on every wooden tie and after a while he stopped the monotony by balancing his body on one rail. I do not think someone who is described as an old bored person would do that.
People who are introvert have a unique ability of concentration while they are at work or doing a task, and Walter was one of them. He is described as a hardworking man and very reliable on his work place. But Mason while being in deep thought of the woman with one ear, loses his concentration at work and a colleague takes notice of this, and they ask him if he is daydreaming. This seemed very unusual to me since he is described as a person whose strength is concentration.
The story’s good plot and the suspense throughout it, makes you want to keep up with the reading and finding out what really happened to Mel, the woman with one ear, the Good Friday and the missing people on the train station. But even though the author makes easy to follow the sequence and events of the story, he gave the character personality traits which did not fit his thinking and actions. The contradictions throughout the story makes you feel somewhat confused and makes you think that the character is not authentic.