The Glass Of Milk Literary Analysis

Upon reading “The Glass of Milk”, the reader believes that the main conflict is the young man being hungry. Although the young man’s hunger is a contributing factor, the conflict is more complicated than the young man not accepting food because of his timidity and shame. The young man desires to be independent, but does not realize that he is hungry for maternal love. The young man being bent is a consequence of the burning for hunger. The young man is offered food by a sailor, but the young man does not take it. The narrator states that the young man was very hungry and had not eaten in three days. After he asked the man if he could get paid sooner, it says, “Suddenly he felt a kind of burning sensation in the pit of his stomach, and he
The young man also feels ashamed. He is ashamed of his appearance and the fact that it might cause feelings of charity. After watching another man take food that was offered to him, it says that the young man would not take the food “more from timidity and shame than because of his pride” (1154). It then states, “And when, as in the recent incident, someone offered him his leftovers, he would decline them heroically, but with regret, because refusing made him even hungrier” (1154). Although the young man is very hungry, he does not want to take food from others because it is not something that he has earned. He will have depended on others to have given him food. The young man would much rather be hungry than to have something that was not gained by him. Therefore the young man does not feel that he is worthy of accepting the
The first time when the young man is eating the cookies and he begins to softly cry the woman tells him to cry. It says the woman was “no longer looking at him: she was looking out into the street at some far-away point, and her face was sad” (1158). The woman might have had a son that was in a similar position as the young man was. The lady might be a mother, so she hates to see the young man in pain. She is reminded of her own son when she see the young man. After the lady has brought out the second plate of cookies, it says, “He ate slowly, without thinking about anything, as if nothing had happened, as if he were in his own house and his mother were that lady behind the counter” (1158). The young man feels that he is home with his own mother after the blonde lady takes care of him. He was not comfortable taking food from the other men, because he was ashamed. With the woman, the young man does not feel uncomfortable taking the food from her, nor is her ashamed to do so. Since he wants to be independent, he does not realize that he needed the lady to depend