Isaac Babel\u2019s My First Goose is a very interesting short story highlighting the acceptance of a new propaganda officer into a Cossack regiment. When the narrator arrives, he is struck by Commander Savitsky\u2019s size. While the commander gives the narrator a hard time, making fun of his glasses and calling him a \u2018mama\u2019s boy\u2019, the majority of the harassment he receives comes from his peers\u2014those in the sixth division of equal rank to the narrator. When reading Pravda, Lenin\u2019s announcements for the day, he becomes too distracted and commands an old, blind woman to make him food. She voices her discontent with the Cossacks, saying all of this makes her want to kill herself. He shouts an expletive at her. Then, he accidentally kills a goose on the street in a very gory fashion, shouting another expletive at the now brainless and dead goose. <\/p>\n
Interestingly, this causes the narrator\u2019s peers to stop messing with him, one claiming that he will \u201cfit in with us\u201d. They even sleep together. Thus, an overreaction, a byproduct of the narrator\u2019s rage, wins the Cossacks over. Judging by his awe of the Commander\u2019s size in the beginning and distractedness in reading Lenin, one would think the narrator would be content with this new acceptance. However, the last line of the story is very important in proving the contrary. While the narrator, \u201csaw women in my dreams\u201d, a superficial \u2018win\u2019 for him, like the killing of the goose, \u201cmy heart, bloodstained from the killing, whined and dripped misery\u201d, alluding to more structural discontent and shamefulness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Isaac Babel\u2019s My First Goose is a very interesting short story highlighting the acceptance of a new propaganda officer into a Cossack regiment. When the narrator arrives, he is struck by Commander Savitsky\u2019s size. While the commander gives the narrator a hard time, making fun of his glasses and calling him a \u2018mama\u2019s boy\u2019, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1017,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-9-the-silver-age-and-revolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}