Perspectives

This last part of the study guide is designed to help you make correlations between Alice Jolly’s short story “Ray the Rottweiler” and current issues, literary period, and similar works. These aspects will help you put the text into perspective and engage in a more meaningful dialogue about the text.

Current issues

The short story covers the broad issue of social exclusion. When we talk about social exclusion, we refer to all types of actions and attitudes which lead to an individual or a minority being isolated or rejected by his/their community.

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Literary period

Published in 2015, the short story can be considered a postmodernist, realistic short story. The story is realistic because it presents believable events in an existing geographical setting. The topic approached and the style of...

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Works with the same theme

To further explore the theme of social exclusion we encourage you to read stories like “Tickits” by Paul Milenski, “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury, or “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes.

“Tickits” follows a man named Toby who spends his day giving tickets to people for minor misbehaviours although he has no official capacity to do so. Toby probably has a cognitive disability, but he also has a strong desire for the world to be perfect. Most people tend to ignore his tickets, thus marginalising him.

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