David Updike's Summer

The story “Summer” written by David Updike captures the title completely. The story is about the summer month of August for the story’s main protagonist, Homer. Homer is a young man who is out of school for the summer and is looking to get away from his family for a little while to gain his sanity back. Homer spends his August with the Thyme family at their lake house. The Thyme family, consisting of the known characters: Fred, Sandra, and Mrs. Thyme, are family friends of Homer and are very comfortable with one another; in fact, Homer describes himself at one point as being their “surrogate son”. Homer falls in love with Fred’s sister Sandra from the moment he sets his eyes on her in a typically cinematic plot of love at first sight, however

There is one theme of this story that I absolutely love and that is Carpe Diem or “All things come and go, so seize the day.” This is the perfect cliche which sums up this whole story with a single line. Homer unfortunately let himself be intimidated by Sandra for the entire summer, and therefore lost his chance at really experiencing what the relationship had to offer to him. He should have really taken the time to realize that the summer was inevitably going to come to an end much quicker than he anticipated as most good things do. He should have realized he had an opportunity and taken a shot at it no matter how hopeless it may have seemed. This really adds a cinematic effect to the plot line. I feel as if when I read this story I am watching an older film perhaps about a boy meets girl situation. Boy meets girl and thinks he never has a chance, boy watches her from afar and somehow always runs into opportunities where he has a shot at achieving his goal yet somehow always misses it. This is a very typical plot but is very well captured with this artfully crafted piece of literature. Using a third person selective omniscient narrator for this story, we get the inner feelings of Homer, while still seeing the outside world which really allows our brains to paint that picture that we are all thinking about when we read this