Two apartments

The two stories of the thesis examine the effectiveness of the main characters in dealing with American life. The disparate backgrounds of each main character further serve to contrast the responses of particular societal types to commonly accepted middle class values. Part of an interrelated series of seven stories all set in the same apartment house, each selection naturally reflects the larger themes of the entire collection: loneliness while being surrounded by people, the difficulty of keeping in the mainstream of American life when ill equipped for it, and the vitality and necessity of the immigrant in America