The Good Samaritan
Sometimes in life you will meet someone who is in need of your help. In some cases you might not even know the person; you just happen to be the one in a million who is at the right place at the right time. Most likely you will try to figure out at once how you might possibly be able to help the person in need. Concerning the level of the needed help you will find the answer more or less simple, but nonetheless it is quite a decision to let someone into your life in order to help them. Your decision may be influenced by your principles, moral and conscience, and in some cases you know that whatever you decide to do the decision will probably affect somebody’s life for ages if not the rest of their life.
Steward Dunlop’s short-story “The Good Samaritan” takes up the theme of being helpful to a person in need as the narrator finds herself in this particular kind of situation when she meets Laylor in a lavatory of the National Portrait Gallery. She is a Londoner. This being the first thing she tells about herself means that obviously it is a rather central part of her character. By stamping herself as a characteristic Londoner she implies that she is quite withdrawn from her surroundings: “I am not in the habit of making friends of strangers. I’m a Londoner. Not even little grey-haired old ladies passing comment on the weather can shame a response from me. I’m a Londoner – aloof sweats from my pores.” (p.1 l.l.1-3) She even repeats that she is a Londoner to emphasize the fact that it is a significant part of her personality.
According to the narrator she has just entered the National Portrait Gallery in order to get out of the cold. From that we can conclude that the story presumably takes place in the winter months. The plot stretches over a couple of hours and is presented in a chronological order. The narrator is first person, and everything we get to know about the events and characters of the story is either through her subjective thoughts or through her dialogues with Laylor who is a foreigner, which is made very distinct by her bad ability to construct grammatically correct sentences. Furthermore the dialogues also make it clear that there is a considerable psychological distance between our narrator and Laylor.
They come across each other in a quite unusual manner as the narrator is caught in the unprepared situation of being surprised by an early period. She needs change to use the tampon machine and no matter how little she, being a Londoner, wants to ask for help she has to. When she asks in a loud voice everybody but one immediately leaves the lavatory. She thinks to herself that all the people leaving are Londoners – just like her. This shows that she does not have a particularly favourable view on Londoners in general. She might even think they are self-centred and a bit selfish as they decide not to help her even though she does not call for much. The only one left in the lavatory is Laylor. The narrator instantly sees that this girl is different – her spectacular eyebrows, wide black eyes and Spanish like accent. Laylor only has coins, lots of them but no bank notes. She now becomes The Good Samaritan, as she gives the narrator three twenty-pence pieces for nothing. The narrator does not want to carry that amount of coins, and when she finds her again later she offers her a cup of tea so that she can pay her back.
Over a cup of tea things come to a change – It turns out that Laylor is from Uzbekistan and barely eighteen. She and her brother were compelled to leave their country when their journalist parents were arrested. They have now been in England for three days, their nights spent in a square, because all they have is a handful of money. These facts shed a completely different light on Laylor. On the one hand the narrator feels tricked into feeling that she owes Laylor to help her, because she as the only one showed helpfulness in the lavatory. However, it also disgusts her just to think of Laylor being in her house and even the before so spectacular eyebrows are now considered pantomime. She cannot help thinking “why me?” (p. 3 l. 95). She feels self-pity as she has her own life and her son to take care of.
But on the other hand she thinks of her own grandmother who came to England from the Caribbean and was completely alone and cold until some night a stranger came and offered her a place to stay that night. Her grandmother is convinced that this act of helpfulness and care from her Good Samaritan is what kept her alive. With this in mind it is quite ironical that her grandmother now “talks with passion about scrounging refugees; those asylum seekers who can’t even speak the language, storming the country and making it difficult for her and everyone else.” (p. 3 l. l. 116-118). This is a clear sign of what is going on in the head of the narrator, which is probably why “The Good Samaritan” is the chosen title for this story.
The narrator comes to the conclusion that “only a savage would turn away when it was merely kindness that was needed. I resolved to help her. (…) All Laylor’s grandchildren would know my name.” (p. 4 l. l. 124-134). She wants to become A Good Samaritan and enjoy the appreciation she would get from helping Laylor. She deep down wants to help her, but she still cannot survey the situation and when she goes to the counter to get Laylor more tissues she just walks out of the place instead. She walks into the cold and as abruptly as they met, as abruptly do they separate and leave the story with a very open ending.
The whole story is presented in past tense which may be an indication that the narrator thinks back of this particular situation. She cannot forget the tough decision she had to make – to be a Good Samaritan and help Laylor or to walk out of there and keep on taking care of her own life as a Londoner. Life is all about taking decisions. Sometimes they are hard – sometimes they are easy, sometimes you can help others, sometimes you have to take care of your own life. You cannot be sure always to make the right decisions, and therefore you will most probably recall a special situation to think it over again and again several times in life. You will just have to believe in your judgmental abilities and sometimes make the hard decisions even though you might regret it later in life.