Good Luck, Bad Luck: Ron Rash’s "Cherokee"

Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15210%2F21%3A73609847" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15210/21:73609847 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3119" target="_blank" >https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3119</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Good Luck, Bad Luck: Ron Rash’s "Cherokee"
Original language description
The article analyzes Ron Rash’s short story “Cherokee,” in which good luck and bad luck play a prominent part. The author suggests that in this story Rash uses strategies known from the short fiction and essays of Flannery O’Connor and masterfully combines them with the existentialist reasoning of Walker Percy and his nineteenth-century Danish predecessor Søren Kierkegaard. The article illustrates how superstitions infiltrate the world of modern-day casinos, with their computerized slot machines, and explains the turning of a gambling experience into a mystical one. A miraculous win is interpreted as God’s grace that comes, totally unearned, to sinners, and is used in the story in accordance with O’Connor’s request for an entirely unexpected and yet believable development. The final part of the article, focusing primarily on the ambiguous ending of the story, explains, with the help of Percy’s and Kierkegaard’s ideas, that good luck automatically presupposes bad luck, exploring at the same time two basic paradoxes of human behavior: that people cannot bear other people’s good luck and that they feel alienated when everything in their own lives is fine, instead craving a change for the worse.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Publication year
2021
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical
Journal of The Short Story in English / Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
ISSN
0294-0442
e-ISSN
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Volume of the periodical
2020
Issue of the periodical within the volume
no.74 (Spring 2020)
Country of publishing house
FR - FRANCE
Number of pages
20
Pages from-to
169-188
UT code for WoS article
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EID of the result in the Scopus database
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