A Broken Clock: Choosing Between Two Readings of a Symbol
A student is answering a question on a short story excerpt. In the passage, a woman named Doreen has kept her late husband's stopped mantel clock on the kitchen shelf for nine years. She winds it every Sunday even though it does not run. When her daughter offers to have it repaired, Doreen says, "It keeps better time than the both of us." In the final paragraph, Doreen moves the clock from the kitchen to a cupboard and puts a bowl of fruit where it stood. The student has drafted two interpretations: (1) the clock represents grief she cannot release; (2) the clock represents her refusal to be managed by other people's schedules. She must decide which reading the text licenses and account for the last paragraph, which she currently treats as unimportant.
1. Which interpretation is better supported, and what textual details decide the question? Address the risk that both readings sound plausible.
Read the worked answer
Reading 2 is better supported - but only because of the winding detail, not the clock itself.
A stopped clock is a near-universal symbol of arrested grief, which is precisely why Reading 1 is the weaker choice: it requires no attention to this text. Any story with a dead husband and a stopped object would yield it. A defensible interpretation must depend on details that could have been otherwise.
What actually decides it:
- She winds it every Sunday. A grieving woman conserving a relic would not perform weekly maintenance on an object she knows will not run. Winding is a ritual of defiance, not preservation.
- "It keeps better time than the both of us." The joke is about timekeeping - about whose schedule governs the house. She is claiming the stopped clock keeps truer time than the living.
- The bowl of fruit. Fruit is the most perishable object in a kitchen. Replacing a stopped clock with fruit is not forgetting; it is choosing ripening over stopping.
On plausibility: both readings can be stated about any clock. The test is which one the sentence-level choices require. Reading 1 requires none of them.
2. The student's draft calls the last paragraph "unimportant." Explain why that judgment would cost marks, and show how the final paragraph constrains the interpretation.
Read the worked answer
Calling the ending unimportant is the single most expensive move available, because endings are where a writer spends accumulated meaning. A marker reads that sentence as "this student ran out of ideas at the point of greatest significance."
The final paragraph is what converts a static symbol into a change. Without it, the story says: Doreen has a clock and a complicated relationship to time. With it, the story says: Doreen had a clock, and then she put it away. The cupboard is not a bin - she keeps the clock - so the ending is neither forgetting nor surrender. It is demotion. She is not destroying the past; she is refusing to let it occupy the kitchen.
That constrains the earlier sentence retroactively. "It keeps better time than the both of us" now reads as a position she has been holding and has finally stopped needing to hold.
The revision the student should make: replace "the last paragraph is unimportant" with a claim about movement - the clock goes from centre to storage, and the kitchen acquires something that spoils. Then argue that this is the story's actual point.