However, language is not the only gadget used by writers to create a witty tone in their stories. Jan Mark, in ‘Feet’, used a couple of other aspects, these including the characters; all of them in his short story are very different from each other and each possesses a distinct characteristic. At the same time that we cannot imagine a teacher who looks like an orangutan in his track suit, we can, due to the fact that his illustrations are so vivid that he manages to bring all of his characters to life.
“I believe myself that he swings from the pipes in the changing room (…). He has very long arms. Probably he can peel bananas with his toes, which have little tufts of hair on, like beard transplants.”
When Jane describes Mr. Evans, one can actually imagine a monkey wearing a track suit, jumping from one pipe to another, and although it seems quite surreal, it is the type of comparison a teenager would make. In addition to that, it is terrifically humorous and clever when she calls him a “finalist in the All-England Anthropoid Ape Championship,” bringing the thought of an ape competing in the Olympics to our minds.
What can also be noticed in this story is that a joke is not always necessary to make a narrative funny, but it does add a lot to it and helps to portray many things. For instance when Jane says that the “thing coming down the tramlines and trying to walk on one leg like Richard the Third only all in white,” was “Richard the Bride”, a neighbour of hers called Carson; it doesn’t help to explain the plot or anything, but it makes the description of the character more interesting to read. Carson is a very peculiar character who turns his ankle, gives evil winks and throws up, but is said, by Jane, to be a very kind person. If one stops to think for a while, one will definitely remember a person one knows who looks just like him. He seems to be the archetypal older boy who is forced by his mother to do humiliating things, such as help with the baby-sitting and ends up doing what he shouldn’t, such as offering beer to younger girls; but funnily enough, in the end, he turns out to be a friend. Almost everyone knows someone like Carson.
The last aspect that will be mentioned in this essay is the plot. A story about a girl who volunteers to be the umpire in a tennis tournament seems a little bizarre, and the fact that the plot revolves around the theme of feet seems fairly unusual; however, it’s for reasons like those that it’s so comical.
At the beginning of the story, when Jane is jabbering about how she should have worn ‘wellies’ instead of sandals, she says, “Nobody looks at feet.” What is interesting about the plot is that everything that happens in it is somehow related to this idea of feet being imperceptible; the ending is all based upon this fact.
“He doesn’t care where he puts his feet.”
When Carson tells this to Jane, regarding Collier, he “probably hadn’t been talking about real feet,” he was just trying to tell her that Collier really didn’t care about the things he did or said, or the consequences he might have to suffer from playing around with people’s feelings, like he did to her; he just acted by impulse. Nevertheless, this turns out to be the epiphany of the story, when Jane realizes that nobody ever looked at feet, since they were busy “watching the fantastic ten yard service” by Collier, and consequently, nobody ever noticed that his “toes were over the baseline three times out of five.” And that is when she wins the match, in a “Pyrrhic victory” calling out ‘Foot fault” every time Collier had his feet where it shouldn’t be.
Jan Mark creates this nice envoi by contradicting the exact thing Jane had said at the beginning. “By now, everybody was looking at his feet,” just because she had told them to.
Maybe what Jan wanted to represent with the idea of people’s feet, was every single thing that is determined by society to be insignificant. Yet, when someone proves the opposite, then everyone agrees it is the opposite. What Jan wanted to say was maybe how vain society is and how it follows one who proves to be right. No one ever seems to find out things by oneself; they prefer to sit and wait for one individual to do so, so that they can decide to agree with it or not. In Jan’s example, no one ever seemed to look at feet, until Jane tells them to, and everybody does.
“There are lots of bones in the foot although you think of it as being solid – down to the toes, at any rate.”
Perhaps what the author was actually trying to say is that there are many things in the world that go unnoticed because society establishes them to be unimportant, or takes conclusions which are precipitated and without any real ‘beddings’, like thinking of the feet as one whole thing, when in fact it had numerous bones.
Or perhaps, he was just trying to write a comic short story with a curious theme. What is successful about it is that it’s humorous in its own, personal way and that from it we can create all sorts of sub-texts, some more serious than others, but all significant.
