“This Old House” by David Sedaris, is a story of a younger adult misunderstood by his own family and most of society who simply just, “longed for a home where history was respected.” After taking a trip to visit an old friend in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he decides to stay in the city longer by finding work and a place to live. He finds work as a dishwasher in a restaurant hoping to eventually advance from his current position. After finding work, he then unexpectedly meets his future landlord who also has the same appreciation for the past. After moving in to his new home, a friendship blossoms between the main character and his landlord, even with other tenants’ opinions and ways of lives that have other opinions on how life …show more content…

The main character gives the reader a real in-depth description of the house from the paint chipped walls to the perfectly placed doilies, “laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs.” The story is narrated by the main character in the first-person. The main character continues to tell his life as if he was having a conversation with a confidant he was face to face with. The characters refer to themselves as “I” throughout the story on several different occasions. One example is (Abcarain, Klotz, and Cohen) “I couldn’t have dreamed that it would also be old and untouched, an actual boarding house”. With the story being told in the first person, this lets the main character fully describe what he is feeling, hearing and seeing. Another part of the setting is the social circumstances that are involved. There was minimal social interaction throughout the story between the tenants in the home or anyone the main character worked with daily. This made the story read more as the main character speaking on his own since it was centered on the old house and the people living in it.

Works Cited

Sedaris, David. “This Old House.” Literature: The Human Experience. 10th ed. Eds. Richard Abcarian, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010.