Television by Lydia Davis

Television

After reading Lydia Davis’s “Television”, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the piece but after a second reading, I liked the piece.

Television certainly plays a large part in most people’s lives and I feel like the first sentence rings true...”We all have these favorite shows coming on every evening”. Of course, everyone has certain TV shows they look forward to and there is that certain build up each week that keeps viewers tuning in. Television and film offer an escape from every day life in different situations, settings, and people from our normal life. I have a visual of the narrator and her family in this piece of a bored wife in a mundane life with her husband and mother. Its almost as if she looks to TV for excitement and even if she doesn’t necessarily like the product on TV she still watches. You also get a sense of loneliness in the story especially on the second page when it describes the situation of taking the phone off the hook and the not answering the door even though it rarely gets knocked on. I also like some of the imagery, for example “ I think it is a television sound beyond the wall, but it’s the honking of wild geese flying south in the first dark of evening.” I also like the way they story is broken up into three settings , it kind of reminded me of coming in from school or work in the afternoon and beginning to watch TV from that point to the end of the night. For instance, the part 1 describes the News and Game shows which are normally on earlier in the day then moving onto nighttime dramas and finally a movie. 

In the final part of the story as the narrator begins talking about her life as a movie and wishes she could have a “movie made for TV” since it would skip over all complications and be easy to understand and major events will happen abruptly. I really found the last page interesting especially when the narrator is talking about major events as well as the last line “All this was compressed into the very end of a day in my life that as the evening advanced had already moved away from me...”