The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 1 Summary: “Shadows on the Wall”

The narrator is an unnamed boy sitting inside his hut with Father. He watches the shadows on the wall grow and change shape as the sun sets. The next day, Father will travel 50 miles by bicycle to retrieve his wife, the narrator’s stepmother, who has run away for the fourth time. The narrator resents his father for driving away his biological mother. As he examines Father’s gray stubble, he is reminded of a pair of dove nestlings that died after their mother was shot.

The narrator recalls the quarrel that ended his parents’ marriage for good. Following the fight, after both Father and Mother stormed out of the house, the narrator fell asleep with the door open on a cold night. He developed a fever, and Mother returned to nurse him back to health. Yet by the time the fever broke, Mother was gone, and Father already had a new wife. Unhappy with his new partner, Father tries to repair his relationship with the narrator. The narrator says, “But he was too late. He had taught me silence and in that long journey between mother’s time and this other woman’s, I had given myself to the shadows” (5).

Story 1 Analysis

With “Shadows on the Wall,” Mungoshi establishes father-son relationships as a prominent dynamic throughout the 17 stories. The fraught relationship between the unnamed father and son in this story will become familiar to readers as they read the collection. Mungoshi’s decision to place this story first is also relevant in that the narrator, though his age goes unmentioned, is likely the youngest of the collection’s largely male protagonists. With each new story, the protagonist tends to be a bit older than previous protagonists, which allows Mungoshi to construct the collection as a broader coming-of-age narrative, even though the characters change. For example, one can imagine the boy from “Shadows on the Wall” growing up to become Nhamo, who in the book’s titular story defies his father by moving from the countryside to the city.

Later divisions between father and son involve broad cultural and social pressures surrounding urbanity and modernization. Yet while the narrator of “Shadows on the Wall” is too young to be concerned with such matters, his conflict with his father foreshadows the conflicts explored in later stories. In this embryonic form the father-son rift is rooted purely in personal betrayal, suggesting that parent-child arguments over mature issues of politics and society are extensions of long-simmering schisms that formed years earlier.

That the narrator is a child also allows Mungoshi to focus heavily on impressions that are laden with symbolism. For example, the “shadows on the wall” that both fascinate and frighten the narrator represent his struggle to view his parents as solid, substantial forms of emotional support. Other vivid impressions include the narrator’s recollection of abandoned dove nestlings “with soft pink vulnerable flesh planted with short scattered grey feathers” (2). He is reminded of the nestlings when he sees his father’s gray stubble. At these moments, the narrator is “the nearest [he] can come to [Father]” (5), suggesting that the only thing these two individuals share is the vulnerability that comes with being abandoned by one’s mother or wife.