Plot Summary
Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Conrad Aiken
Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Fiction | Short Story | Middle Grade | Published in 1934
Plot Summary
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” is a 1934 short story by American author Conrad Aiken. It tells the tale of twelve-year-old Paul Hasleman, who begins to daydream after a strange hallucination in which he believed the world was covered in snow. Paul becomes obsessed with his daydreams about snow, losing his grip on the world around him. Though his parents intervene and call a doctor, all attempts fail to draw him back to reality. One of Aiken’s best-known works, the story interrogates the modern psychoanalytic notion of insanity, suggesting that the normative concept of “sanity” does not prove the existence of any objective reality, but represents, rather, the products of shared, mostly unconscious beliefs.
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” is divided into four sections. In the first section, Paul Hasleman attends sixth grade in Mrs. Buell’s classroom. He cannot focus on his schoolwork, for he is entangled in the vivid memory of an experience he had a few days earlier. He vacantly observes Mrs. Buell’s globe as she gives the class a geography lesson and hears a classmate in front of him, Deirdre, timidly explain the definition of the word “equator.” Paul is distracted by a memory of snow seeming to fall outside his house. He had inferred that the snow was falling because he heard the muffled crunch of the post officer’s feet as he walked along the cobblestones. However, when Paul rose to look at the snow, the ground was bare. Nonetheless, Paul has since been convinced that a “secret snow” has fallen.
The secret snow becomes symbolic of Paul’s dissociation from reality. As the days go on, he remembers the postman’s footsteps more and more faintly, as if he is slowly receding from existence, replaced by the snow. Paul holds an inexplicable understanding that he shouldn’t tell anyone else about his knowledge of the secret snow. Meanwhile, at school, Mrs. Buell teaches a class about the search for the Northwest Passage during the 1600s and 1700s. He returns to his senses briefly to answer a question about the adventurer Henry Hudson. Deirdre turns and praises him, and then the bell rings, signaling the end of class.
The second part of the story begins as Paul walks home from school. He reflects on his lack of desire to get up in the morning, since it is so easy to think about the secret snow from his bed. The part of the world he once accepted as reality seems to transform into a strange, hostile, and unintelligible place. Paul looks with revulsion at the disorder and decay of some trash left in a gutter. When he reaches his house, he perceives it as a foreign place.
The third part of the story begins after supper the same evening. Paul’s parents are worried about him and summon a doctor to check his health. Paul is hostile to and noncompliant with the doctor, regarding the examination as an interrogation. As the doctor examines him, he begins to hear the secret snow. The doctor’s line of questioning brings Paul to confess that the reason for his intense distraction is his obsession with thinking about the snow.
In the fourth part of the story, Paul’s parents fear that he is losing his sanity. He rejects their attempts to help him and shuts himself in his room. In his mind’s eye, the snow encroaches on everything he knows. He feels a sudden loathing for his mother as she begs to help him, sending her away, telling her that he hates her. At last, he slips fully into insanity. He perceives that the problems of the world become “solved” and “seamless” as the snow expands without end, sounding like laughter. At last, the snow speaks to him, offering to tell him “the last, most beautiful and secret story,” in which the world collapses and ends rather than complicate or extend. As the story ends, Paul feels a sensation like sleep.
The jarring, ambiguous ending of “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” neither confirms nor denies the validity of Paul’s vision of snow: it is as if reality has branched off into separate “stories,” and he has been pulled along the path less traveled. Aiken, through this obscure but seemingly meaningful descent into insanity, questions the assumption that sanity is the only valid way of experiencing reality.
“Silent Snow, Secret Snow” is divided into four sections. In the first section, Paul Hasleman attends sixth grade in Mrs. Buell’s classroom. He cannot focus on his schoolwork, for he is entangled in the vivid memory of an experience he had a few days earlier. He vacantly observes Mrs. Buell’s globe as she gives the class a geography lesson and hears a classmate in front of him, Deirdre, timidly explain the definition of the word “equator.” Paul is distracted by a memory of snow seeming to fall outside his house. He had inferred that the snow was falling because he heard the muffled crunch of the post officer’s feet as he walked along the cobblestones. However, when Paul rose to look at the snow, the ground was bare. Nonetheless, Paul has since been convinced that a “secret snow” has fallen.
The secret snow becomes symbolic of Paul’s dissociation from reality. As the days go on, he remembers the postman’s footsteps more and more faintly, as if he is slowly receding from existence, replaced by the snow. Paul holds an inexplicable understanding that he shouldn’t tell anyone else about his knowledge of the secret snow. Meanwhile, at school, Mrs. Buell teaches a class about the search for the Northwest Passage during the 1600s and 1700s. He returns to his senses briefly to answer a question about the adventurer Henry Hudson. Deirdre turns and praises him, and then the bell rings, signaling the end of class.
The second part of the story begins as Paul walks home from school. He reflects on his lack of desire to get up in the morning, since it is so easy to think about the secret snow from his bed. The part of the world he once accepted as reality seems to transform into a strange, hostile, and unintelligible place. Paul looks with revulsion at the disorder and decay of some trash left in a gutter. When he reaches his house, he perceives it as a foreign place.
The third part of the story begins after supper the same evening. Paul’s parents are worried about him and summon a doctor to check his health. Paul is hostile to and noncompliant with the doctor, regarding the examination as an interrogation. As the doctor examines him, he begins to hear the secret snow. The doctor’s line of questioning brings Paul to confess that the reason for his intense distraction is his obsession with thinking about the snow.
In the fourth part of the story, Paul’s parents fear that he is losing his sanity. He rejects their attempts to help him and shuts himself in his room. In his mind’s eye, the snow encroaches on everything he knows. He feels a sudden loathing for his mother as she begs to help him, sending her away, telling her that he hates her. At last, he slips fully into insanity. He perceives that the problems of the world become “solved” and “seamless” as the snow expands without end, sounding like laughter. At last, the snow speaks to him, offering to tell him “the last, most beautiful and secret story,” in which the world collapses and ends rather than complicate or extend. As the story ends, Paul feels a sensation like sleep.
The jarring, ambiguous ending of “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” neither confirms nor denies the validity of Paul’s vision of snow: it is as if reality has branched off into separate “stories,” and he has been pulled along the path less traveled. Aiken, through this obscure but seemingly meaningful descent into insanity, questions the assumption that sanity is the only valid way of experiencing reality.