Tickets, please by D.H.Lawrence

[Solchu]

Hello everyone! I'm analyzing this story because I have an exam next week.. and one of the question I'll have to answer is whether John Thomas is somehow disabled or not? As he is not at war, we are inclined to believe that he is, but what is wrong with him? My teacher says that we can find the answer in the text, but honestly I cant find it! Is he homesexual? What's the meaning of coddy?

Thanks for your help!!

[Bad Horse]

First, it is a story of revenge.

Your response freaked me out, because I used to use that same avatar and at first I thought I'd written it.

The story is online here. There is revenge in the story, but it isn't a story of revenge, and it isn't humorous in the end.

Brooks & Warren, my favorite story dissectors, included an analysis of this story in the third edition of Understanding Fiction (which is one of the best books I've ever read on literature, and the one I tell every aspiring writer to read first, before getting bogged down in advice on structure and style in Writer's Digest & co.). They wrote:

The story... succeeds in dramatizing what may be called the "doubleness" of loce--its strange mixture of aggressiveness and passivity, of cruelty and tenderness, of possessiveness and surrender. All the characters in the story experience something of these contradictory feelings, but the author has properly kept th efocus upon one particular character, Annie, who is more deeply involved than the others, and who therefore not only feels the experience more intensely but is also the more intensely subject to the contradictory impulses within the experience.

What is it that Annie wants from the trick to be played on John Thomas? ... Unconsciously Annie must have wanted much more... Certainly she must have wanted the specific confrontation with him... Secretly, perhaps she wanted to hear him name her as his choice--if only to have the chance to tell him she has no interest in him. But it is plain that neither Annie nor the rest of the girls have really thought out just what they expect the prank to accomplish.

... Once they have got into it, their actions are emotional and compulsive, sexual in fact, and sexual in a way that puzzles and even frightens the girls. They have worked themselves in a wild frenzy that they cannot understand and that might conceivably end in extreme violence.... The only satisfactory ending for such a mixture of feelings--and of feelings wakeed to such intensity by the physical struggle--is possession and marriage. [Brooks & Warren wrote this sometime between the 1950s and the 1970s, in a less-open-minded time than when Lawrence wrote the story in 1919.] But this is the solution that the tomboy prank has made impossible. It is as if Annie's revenge has made John Thomas more desirable, and yet the forcing of his admission that, having to choose, we would indeed choose her, has made that choice in fact impossible. The very frustration of the prank she has engineered has revealed to her things about herself that she had not surmised.

You must remember that Lawrence is the ultimate anti-feminist. He hated the war for what it did to society, kill good men. He hated the fact that the war inverted positions of power. He found it unnatural that women were running society and what is left of men are cripples and dandies.

Bernard-Jean Ramadier wrote an interesting analysis of "Tickets, Please" that agrees with your statement.