Notch
Submitted by Taylor Stoehr (profile)

Title and Author: Notch (full text) by Maxim Gorky (populist author, the Russian equivalent of Twain)
Genre: Short story (9 pages, easy reading)
Theme: Cruelty and its sources, in relation to punishment
Class type: Men

This story, written in the first person by an assumed ex-convict (as Gorky himself was, for political offenses sometimes labeled "vagrancy"), concerns the dynamics of a Russian prison yard, where a prisoner nicknamed Notch has established a reputation as jailhouse clown, always thinking up new jokes and buffoonery to entertain his fellow prisoners. One day a stray kitten, taken on as a mascot of the yard, steals his thunder, until Notch thinks of a crude entertainment that will destroy his rival. He proposes dipping the kitten into a bucket of green paint - a comic experiment that everyone agrees to heartily. Then, once accomplished, it becomes apparent that the poor kitten will die, and the men turn on Notch savagely, beating him without mercy. At the end, we see him battered and bleeding, still performing his pathetic pantomimes and recovering his fickle audience. The kitten will be seen no more.

This story is best used in combination with other short works or excerpts. We've paired it with two, both of which also deal with cruelty and punishment in different amalgams. One, a passage from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "House of the Dead," not only has the obvious similarity of being set in a Russian prison camp, where the author was himself an inmate, but also deals with the way that people who are punished themselves tend to be cruel to others who happen to fall into their power, passing along the suffering and humiliation by whatever means they can.

The second work we've used is a passage from Richard Wright's Black Boy, recounting how Richard, no older than five, executed a stray kitten with a noose hung on a nail. Richard's cruelty was his perverse way of defying his father, who routinely treated the boy with offhand contempt, as if he were a stray kitten.

These three works offer many approaches to the central questions of cruelty and punishment, and we leave it relatively open as to which connections our students start with. The reading assignment is matched to our ongoing core text, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, when we come to chapters dealing with the cruelties of slavery.

Our questions to students, in assigning these texts, are these:

What causes cruelty? Why do people inflict pain on others? Is it out of anger and hatred, or for other reasons? What's the effect of cruelty on the person who is cruel? On the victim?

Students write brief answers to this, but an opening exercise covering much the same ground is also asked for when they come to class to insure that everyone has meditated on the issues before we begin our discussion.

Further questions:

What does punishment do to its victims? And what does it do to the person who does the punishing? Can a person inflict pain and suffering on someone else without being cruel? What difference does it make if the punishment is deserved?

We do not attempt to go into the texts themselves to any depth, preferring to deal with the issues as they arise in class discussion and not wanting to leave out any students who happen to have neglected the reading, for good reasons or bad. One area that seems most problematic in discussing the texts themselves is the difficulty students have putting their finger on the motives of the various punishers in these stories. The authors have typically left it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions, and indeed the etiology of cruelty and the ideology of punishment are neither easy to identify nor to justify. We often frame our conversations around the problem of exacting obedience from children when attempting to teach the difference between right and wrong.