With every minute detail, the present short story gives you the convention of how the child psychology works with far-fetched images. And the reaction of it may led it to unwanted path.

1. I Want to Know
Why (1921)
by Sherwood
Anderson
Kaushal Desai
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2. Contents
About writer
Title
Theme
Characters
Summary
Various concepts of the story

3. ~ I Want to Know Why (1921)
by Sherwood Anderson
“It brings a lump up into
my throat when a horse
runs. . . . It’s in my blood
like in the blood of . . .
trainers,” he says.
PC: Kaushal Desai

4. About writer
01
Sherwood Anderson

5. Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
● Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short
story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works.
● Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and
business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio.
● In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to
abandon his business and family to become a writer.
● At the time, he moved to Chicago and was eventually married
three additional times.
● His most enduring work is the short-story
sequence Winesburg, Ohio, which launched his career.
● Throughout the 1920s, Anderson published several short story
collections, novels, memoirs, books of essays, and a book of
poetry. Though his books sold reasonably well, Dark
Laughter (1925), a novel inspired by Anderson's time in New
Orleans during the 1920s, was his only bestseller.

6. Title
02
“I Want to Know Why”

7. • "I Want to Know Why," published in the collection The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of
Impressions of American Life in Tales and Poems (1921), the fifth book by Sherwood Anderson,
reflects the many menial jobs in his youth that familiarized him with the people and procedures
of livery and racehorse stables.
A first-person account of a young man who associated truth and beauty with the world of horse
racing, in everything about this field, from the way the horses’ appearances, the smell of the
stables and the people who tend the animals. Not close to his father, he constantly runs away
from home and positions Jerry Tilford, a horse handler, as a father figure.
Title:
“I Want to Know Why”

8. Theme
03

9. Theme:
Passion
Betrayal

10. Theme of Passion:
~ The narrator’s passion for horses is on another level. It is for this reason
that he and his three friends escape to go experience horse-racing
adventures without permission from their parents.
~ Additionally, the narrator indicates that whenever he sees horses running
he gets a “lump up into his throat.” This shows that the narrator has an
intense passion for horses. The narrator also depicts the inhabitants of
Beckersville as passionate about horses. In his words, he states, “every
breath of air you breathe in Beckersville is about horses." He also
states that “everything talked about in Beckersville is about horses.“
~ These two statements indicate that people in Beckersville are very
passionate about horses. It is due to his passion for horses that the
narrator begins to idolize Jerry Tillford, a successful horse trainer.

11. Theme of Betrayal:
~ First, the narrator and his three friends betray their parent's trust by
escaping without informing them. In an ideal situation, it is expected that
children ask for permission from parents before they can travel anywhere.
~ However, this is not the case for the narrator and his three friends.
Another instance of betrayal is evident in the instance where the narrator
finds Jerry Tillford drunk and in the company of a prostitute.
~ This is an indicator that reality is far from what he had formerly
perceived it to be. The narrator had so much trust in Tillford and had even
started to idolize him. It is evident in the story that the narrator had begun
to like Tillford more than he even liked his father. However, after the
incident at the brothel, the narrator feels betrayed and lost, hence the title
of the story: “I Want to Know Why.“
~ far-fetched impulses occurs with a boy after what he saw.

12. Characters
04

13. Protagonist - A 15 year-old boy from Kentucky, he recounts
the events of the story through the first person reflective
narrative; the events in the story occurred one year prior. The
character's commitment to learning the sport of race horsing is
intense, and at one point he observes that,
I always am wanting to be a trainer or owner, and at the
risk of being seen and caught and sent home I went to the
paddocks before every race. The other boys didn't but I
did.

14. Jerry Tillford - the trainer of the stallion Sunstreak. The narrator quickly
develops a familial relationship with Tillford, noting that he "liked him...even
more than I ever liked my own father.”
The narrator's father - is an attorney. While the reader is never
introduced to him except through short descriptions of his personality, he
plays a major role in the narrator's psychological complexions. The
narrator lacks respect for his father, but doesn't necessarily dislike him.
Several of the narrator's friends are named, but their characters are not
fully developed, and we only know they are adolescents from Kentucky
who shared an interest in horses, albeit less intense than the narrator.
They are Hanley Turner, Henry Rieback, and Tom Tumberton, Dave
Williams, Arthur Malford, Bildad Johnson.

15. Summary
05

16. ~ A variation of a journey of initiation, "I Want to Know Why" presents a
boy of 15 years teetering on the verge of sexual discovery, suffering a
shock to his innocence, and a year later though he speaks of maturity
being still mystified.
~ The call to adventure is a horse race at Saratoga in upstate New York.
With all the markings of a boy's adventure, the narrator steals away without
telling his parents, leaving Kentucky with three friends, hopping freight
cars, and following in his mind not adventure but something much more
important, his love of horses.
~ The black man Bildad, doing odd chores at livery barns in the winter and
working as a cook at racetracks in the summer.

17. ~ The narrator's sense of values soon emerges from his self-
confession. His faith resides in two standards, about which he
has absolute opinions: "niggers" and horses.
~ He wishes he were a black with the freedom to hang around
livery barns, and his kinship with a quality horse enables him
to interpret the horse's thoughts.
~ Regarding blacks, he feels, "You can trust them."
Regarding horses, he says, "There isn't anything so lovely and
clean and full of spunk and honest and everything as some
race horses."

18. ~ At the difficult age between childhood and maturity, the narrator no
longer expects his lawyer father to buy him things. Maturing, he earns his
own money and wants to be a man and to think straight.
~ Yet he knows that he cannot be a stable boy, because his father won't let
him, and he risks being caught and sent home for viewing the horses in the
paddocks before races.
~ The boy expresses self-confidence, but uncertainties intrude and
foreshadow his climactic befuddlement. A horse the narrator picks will win
unless "they've got him in a pocket behind another or he was pulled
or got off bad at the post or something." By the same reasoning a
trainer will be admired unless the boy observes the trainer violating what
he thinks are their common standards.

19. ~ The sexual element remains suppressed throughout.
~ The narrator recognizes two winners: Middlestride, a gelding; and
Sunstreak, a stallion who is "like a girl you think about sometimes but
never see" and who is "hard all over and lovely too. When you look at
his head you want to kiss him."
~ Good breeding means that a thoroughbred "sired right and out of a
good mare" and trained right can run; the narrator makes no assessment
of stud purposes but knows a horse to serve only one of two purposes,
running in races or pulling a plow.

20. ~ Knowledge occupies the realm of the metaphysical, far beyond the
physical qualities of speed and appearance; and a touch of mysticism that
enables the narrator to see inside a horse provides the emotional
connection with Tillford, in whose eyes he finds a shared knowledge about
Sunstreak's success.
~ At a glance "I loved the man as much as I did the horse because he
knew what I knew." The narrator knows that the trainer's pride is like that
of a mother for her child, and he likes the trainer even more than he likes
his own father.

21. ~ After the race, desiring to be near the trainer and without
knowing why,
~ Tillford and other white men from home flirt with prostitutes.
While he spies on them, the shameful talk and behavior and
the barnyard odor fill him with disgust and challenge his
standards: "A nigger wouldn't go into such a place."
~ At a younger age he wanted to be a jockey or a stable boy.
At this time he wants to be an owner or a trainer.
~ Blacks can make you laugh, whereas whites cannot; blacks
"won't squeal on you" and are "squarer with kids." He
dislikes Henry Hellinfinger, who is "too lazy to work."

22. ~ Tillford looks at the prostitute with his eyes shining just as
they had shone when he looked at Sunstreak, and then he
kisses her. The narrator's love for Tillford turns to hatred.
~ The story seems to scrape the surface of a profound
meaning that resides in the narrator's fine sense of tuning
regarding women and horses.
~ When the sexual awakening occurs, he will not bestow his
attentions on just any female as Tillford did but only on a
thoroughbred.

23. At the end of “I Want to Know Why,” the young protagonist learns
that, outside of the stables, Jerry Tilford is a different person. The
protagonist changes so dramatically that he does not even use
Jerry’s name when referring to him. Calling him “that man” illustrates
his disappointment and a betrayal of his trust and beliefs.

24. Various concepts
of the story
06

25. • Ignorance is bliss:
~ If one is unaware of an unpleasant fact or
situation one cannot be troubled by it.
~ Here, in this story protagonist could have
done this thing to make out from the trauma.

26. What is Sigmund Freud's theory of child development?
Freud proposed that psychological development in childhood takes place
during five psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and
genital.. Freud also believed that all tension was due to the build-up of libido
(sexual energy) and that all pleasure came from its discharge.
~ The boy was presented in the story as innocent and a lad who
idealized the subject of his passion. The relationship between one
of his idols - a man and a "bad woman" overturned his attitude to
life. He wants to know why (look to the title of the story).
~ Physical necessity which can not understand by narrator at the
age of 15th (prostitution)
~ Affect the psychology

27. Realty vs. fantasy:
~ What did narrator believed at first level and what he saw about Jerry Tillford
is coming back to reality rather than what he believed by himself.
~ At the stage of adolescence, a boy miseries the situation.
~ And the boy (narrator) keep musing then…
“I keep thinking about it and it spoils looking
at horses and smelling things and hearing
riggers laugh and every thing. Sometimes I’m
so mad about it I want to fight someone. It
gives me the fantods. What did he do it for? I
want to know why.”

28. Thanks!
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