The Lamp at Noon

The story takes place in three locations on a barren farm belonging to a farmer named Paul and his wife Ellen. These two characters serve as the protagonists and there are no other characters who utter any dialogue. The couple has one child, an infant who is not mentioned by name. The farm is located in the middle of the Canadian prairie during the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression. The majority of the action occurs in the kitchen of a two-room farmhouse, with a stable and the open plains serving as secondary locations. The entire narrative spans the course of a few hours in a single day—beginning at noon and ending in the early evening. While the action of the story is unfolding, a massive—howling dust storm churns outside. The storm is loud and causes the entire environment of the farm to be covered with dust. It makes it difficult and dangerous to breathe and causes tension between the two main characters. The storm and its winds drive forward the theme of Nature as a Physically and Psychologically Destructive Force, bringing desperation, isolation, and death.The story opens with Ellen, a young woman as yet unnamed, alone in the house with only her baby for company. She lights the lamp, one of the main symbols of the story, even though it is only noon to combat the darkness brought by the three-day storm that still wails outside the house, rattling the walls. After lighting the lamp, she gazes through the window, awaiting the return of her husband, Paul. The theme of Physical and Emotional Isolation is immediately clear, as Ellen briefly cracks the door, only to shut it after the sun—reminiscent of the lamp light—peeks through. For Ellen, who has lost all hope in the farm, the light correlates only to Paul. The symbol of Ellen’s eyes is also introduced in these early paragraphs, as glaring into the storm leaves her eyes “strained apart and rigid,” unable to close, and with “a curious immobility.” Ellen mentally lacks the malleability of Paul to adapt to their stark circumstances; with an eye to the ticking clock, literally and metaphorically, Ellen swallows her wish for emotional connection with her husband. It is better for both of them, she reasons, not to give in.

Paul, though he possesses the same resolve as Ellen to win their argument, still clings to his plans for the future. His belief in these plans is so fervent that he is “blind” to the reality of their circumstances, living partly in the future instead of in the present. Paul seeks further isolation, leaving for the stable and then the tool shed, deepening Ellen’s sense of being trapped alone in the house and contributing to the motif of confined spaces. Like Ellen, he feels a keen Desperation for Change, but the change he craves necessitates a change in nature, not in himself. Paul struggles to take any responsibility for his family’s state; his greatest shift in his beliefs is merely acknowledging that Ellen may have been correct about growing only wheat, which had drained the soil of nutrients. But shortly after, even when confronted with the devastation the storm has caused as the winds abate to allow a glimpse of the fields, Paul’s instinct is to prioritize the land. He thinks about how to defend the land against Ellen’s words, rather than even considering leaving.

Paul’s blindness to the present is ironically expressed as his focus on the glow of the lamp and, in the end, on the sunset. Whereas blindness is normally associated with darkness, Ross associates Paul’s blindness with light. In the end, however, after the winds settle just enough, and “the fields before him struck his eyes to comprehension” (14), Paul returns to the house to find the lamp extinguished. He soon finds Ellen crouched amid the sand, their dead child in her arms. Whether the child was smothered by the dust or by her protective arms, representing the parent’s love, makes no difference—the child is gone. As Paul carries them both back toward the house, he keeps “his eyes before him” (14), focused on where, beyond the last clouds of dust, “the sunset smouldered like a distant fire” (14). Paul’s attention has shifted, finally, from his dreams of the future to his family in the present—that is, from the lamp to the sun. Whether that shift has come too late or not is not entirely clear. Though Ellen observes that a red sky is a good omen for tomorrow, it is a sunset, not a sunrise, that the exhausted couple is walking into.