Lydia Davis' "Television"

The dispassionate narrator is one of the most striking elements of Lydia Davis' "Television". While she knows that her mother "is in love with an anchorman," and her husband "sits with his eyes on a certain young reporter and waits for the camera to draw back and reveal her breasts," she does not cast judgement on either of them. In fact, she spends more time thinking about commercials than her husband's extramarital interests. Davis demonstrates that narrators can be alien and pathetic simultaneously—while the speaker is cold and alien, her story still has emotional weight, especially when she desires approval; she is child-like when she says that, "We listen to the ads until we are exhausted, punished with lists: they want us to buy so much, and we try, but we don't have a lot of money. Yet we can't help admiring the science of it all."Davis has created a character that is more or less impossible; someone completely anodyne and antiseptic, anesthetized by the glow of the television. She shows the value of unconventional narrators.

Davis' setting is also particularly interesting, mainly because it barely exists. There is a television, and people are watching it, but everything is disjointed, mercurial, and strange. Early on, the narrator mentions dead people walking by her window, and while this does not happen witin the context of the story, it still creates a ghastly image. The game show contestant's father also lends "Television" a surreal air; he is moist and corpulent and silent, but the narrator's family is still fascinated by him.

"Television" ignores or rejects many treasured conventions of short stories. The narrator does not possess a particularly probable personality, and the setting is minimalistic and strange, but Davis maintains a sense of cohesion and internal logic. She preserves the fictive dream. While having realistic and relatable characters and detailed settings are both meritous, their presence ought not be taken for granted.