Here is the essay of Games at Twilight we made in pairs. I did it with my partner Lucia Frias.

Essay Games at Twilight

Games at Twilight by Anita Desai is a short story about a young boy’s despair generated from a realization of his insignificance. Do you agree?

In this essay we are going to analyse the insignificance that the protagonist of Games At Twilight felt.

Since  the beginning of the story, Ravi, the protagonist, wanted to beat his cousins and brothers in “hide and seek”. He wanted to be a champion, to feel victorious. His mind and thoughts were focused on the game. “…To be the winner, in a circle of older, bigger, luckier children…” Ravi would do everything to win, he stayed in a horrible and dark shed, accompanied by spiders and rats, just for a game.

As the story continues, Ravi was still in there, waiting to be found, until he realised that he had to touch the den. When he left the shed, running in a desperate way, feeling proud of himself, he found his family chanting and playing other games, but his illusion of winning was still alive. “Seeing his attended to, the children went back to clasping their hands and chanting… ‘I won, I won, I won.’ He bawled, shaking his head so that the big tears flew.” As the quote shows, he had the necessity to show his awaited triumph although his family was with their minds in another place. Ravi wanted to be recognised as a champion.

The disappointment that he had was very strong, he had been ignored and forgotten by his own family all the afternoon. He was expecting congratulations from his cousins and siblings, but what he had were insults. “Stop it, stop it Ravi. Don’t be a baby…” He also felt anguished, he has been waiting for something that didn’t happen.

After this, his partners encouraged him to play another game, and he felt like a jerk, so he moved aside and started crying. “He felt his heart go heavy and ache inside him unbearably. He laid down full length on the dump grass, crushing his face into it, no longer crying, silence by a terrible sense of his insignificance.” Ravi wasn’t sure of what was going on, he didn’t know how to react, he felt that crying was the only way to take off his pain. He realised that had been ignored the whole time.

To sum up, we agree at a hundred percent that this story is about a young boy who realize his insignificance and his despair.