I Sell My Dreams – Class 12 English Chapter 1 Notes & NCERT PDF

The Short Story: Section Introduction

Kaleidoscope opens its prose fiction section by defining the form: "A short story is a prose narrative of limited length." It arranges characters' actions and thoughts into a plot, which "may be comic, tragic, romantic or satiric." Its central incident is chosen to reveal the protagonist's life and character as fully as possible. The term covers a very wide range, from a story of about five hundred words to "longer and more complex works" of middle length, which sit "between the tautness of the short narrative and the expansiveness of the novel." The stories deal with "fantasy, reality, alienation and the problem of choice in personal life." The section has three short stories and two long ones, by writers from five cultures (Colombia, Ireland, Poland/USA, Britain and China). Keep these four themes in mind: every story in this unit fits at least one of them.

About the Author

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) grew up with his grandparents in northern Colombia because his parents were poor. He was a novelist, short-story writer and journalist, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His masterpieces are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. His recurring themes are violence, solitude and "the overwhelming human need for love". The book describes this story as a high point of Latin American magical realism, "rich and lucid, mixing reality with fantasy."

Summary

The Havana disaster. One morning at nine, while the narrator is at breakfast on the terrace of the Havana Riviera Hotel, a huge wave lifts cars off the seafront avenue and embeds one of them in the hotel wall. When a crane pulls the car out, a woman's body is found strapped in by her seat belt. She is so badly crushed that she cannot be recognised. She wears "a gold ring shaped like a serpent, with emerald eyes." The police say she was housekeeper to the new Portuguese ambassador. Her name means nothing to the narrator, but the ring does.

Vienna, thirty-four years earlier. The narrator remembers a woman he met in a Vienna tavern used by Latin American students. She was Colombian, about thirty, plain but "a charming human being", and she wore a similar Egyptian serpent ring on her right forefinger. The students called her "Frau Frieda". When he asked how she came to be there, she replied: "I sell my dreams." As a child in Caldas she began the family custom of telling dreams before breakfast. At seven she dreamed that a brother was carried off by a flood, and she interpreted the dream to mean that he "shouldn't eat sweets". The boy later choked to death on a piece of caramel he was eating in secret. In Vienna she was hired by a rich, superstitious family simply to dream. Every morning at breakfast she decided what each member should do, until "even the faintest sigh was breathed by her order." One night she told the narrator: "You must leave right away and not come back to Vienna for five years." He took the last train to Rome that night and never went back.

Barcelona, with Neruda. Years later the narrator is lunching in Barcelona with the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whom he compares to "a Renaissance pope: He was gluttonous and refined." Neruda eats three whole lobsters and senses someone staring at him. It is Frau Frieda, now old and fat. Neruda dismisses prophecy: "Only poetry is clairvoyant." Frieda tells the narrator she has retired to a "fake castle" in Oporto, and he realises that "dream by dream, she had taken over the entire fortune" of her Viennese patrons. He tells her he has always thought her dreams were "a stratagem for surviving"; she laughs and calls him impudent. After his siesta Neruda says: "I dreamed she was dreaming about me." The narrator jokes, "That's right out of Borges." Frieda then says the same thing about the poet: "I dreamed he was dreaming about me."

The ending. Months after Havana, the narrator meets the Portuguese ambassador, who praises the dead woman warmly. Asked "In concrete terms... what did she do?", he answers: "Nothing... She dreamed."

Characters

Themes

Literary Devices and Style

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

The Understanding questions ask whether the author believed in Frieda's prophetic ability, why he thought her dreams were a stratagem for survival, and why Neruda is compared to a Renaissance pope. The Appreciation questions ask about the serpent-ring image, the interweaving of imagination and reality, the contradiction in the last exchange, and the irony in the story.

Outline 1: Did the narrator believe in Frau Frieda's dreams? He openly calls them "no more than a stratagem for surviving", but his behaviour tells a different story. He left Vienna that same night, felt like "a survivor of some catastrophe I never experienced", and refuses to return "Just in case." Conclusion: his reason doubts, but his superstition obeys.

Outline 2: The contradiction in "Nothing... She dreamed." In concrete terms she did no work, yet dreaming was her whole profession. It earned her a fortune and absolute control over the family. The ambassador's "disenchantment" hints that he too has realised how cleverly she lived off others' belief.

Outline 3: Irony. The prophet of the family's fate apparently could not foresee her own violent death. The poet who scorns prophecy dreams about her. The narrator ends with a story but no certainty.

Language Work in the chapter covers phrases with "dream" and "sell", Emphasis and end-weight in sentences, and counting syllables.

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