Friday

Several times throughout the collection, important events take place on Friday - or, more specifically, characters follow routines that center on Friday. Two examples: every Friday, the colonel goes on an expedition to collect his eternally missing mail; and every Friday, Father Anthony Isabel goes to the train station to watch for new arrivals. There is, in this parallel, a sense that for these two characters at least, Fridays are part of their clinging to hope that something in their lives might change - in other words, an aspect of one of the collection's central themes.

The Colonel's Umbrella ("No One Writes to the Colonel")

At the beginning of the story, the colonels umbrella is torn and tattered, a symbol of the life he is living and of the hopes he has for that life to be improved. Later, he is offered the change to take...