saif safat asked 7 years ago
The human memory surprisingly remain strong in lender’s case than in case of borrower. By referring to the incident in the story My Lost Dollar by Stephen Leacock, show how the above statement proved.
Stephen Leacock’s story ‘My Lost Dollar’ employs humour and irony to expose the human behaviour in different situations. Here he shows how difficult lenders find it to forget the money they lend even if the borrower is the closest friend. But when we sit in the borrower’s seat, we forget or rather wish to forget that very quickly. This is exactly what happened in the speaker’s case in the story.
When the speaker’s friend Todd was leaving for Bermuda on a certain 8th April, he needed a dollar in change to pay his taxi and the speaker lent the dollar to him.
He merely said, “Let me have a dollar, will you?”
I said, “Certainly. Is a dollar enough?”
The speaker also mentions that it happened quite simply and naturally and he hardly realized it till it was all over. And he believes that when Todd took that dollar he meant to give it back.
Since then the speaker was waiting to get the dollar back. When Todd sent him a note from Hamilton, Bermuda, he thought that the dollar would be in it. But it was not there. Todd came back within three weeks. Speaker met him at the train to receive him and spent the evening together talking about Bermuda. He did things like suggesting to take a taxi and giving stress on the word ‘dollar’ with the hope that it may remind him of the dollar he owes to the speaker. But after some tries he realized that Todd had forgotten it altogether.
In the later part of the story, a thought comes into the speaker’s mind. If Todd owes him a dollar and has forgotten it, it is possible — indeed it is theoretically probable — that there must be men to whom he owes a dollar which he has forgotten. “There must be a list of them.” Then he reminded of people who had lent him a dollar in recent times over the bridge table or somewhere else.
Then he finished his story with some humorous touch stating that he will start a Back to Honesty movement and joking that no reader should be careless enough to leave this copy round where it might be seen by Major Todd. The speaker realised that the human memory remain strong in case of lender than that of the borrower.