44 pages • 1 hour read
Edwidge DanticatEverything Inside
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Dosas”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Dosas” Summary
Elsie is a Haitian American live-in nurse’s assistant tending a renal-failure patient named Gaspard. The story begins when Elsie’s ex-husband Blaise calls to tell her that his girlfriend Olivia—who had once been Elsie’s best friend—has been kidnapped at gunpoint in Haiti. He explains that the ransom is $50,000, but that he’s trying to negotiate. Elsie is horrified and asks Blaise to keep her updated. Meanwhile, Gaspard’s daughter, Mona, is critical of the time Elsie spends on her phone while at work. Elsie recalls the circumstances that brought them all together: she and Olivia met while working as nurses, and Olivia often accompanied Elsie to a club called Dédé’s to watch Blaise’s band play. The three soon became inseparable, and Elsie describes them like a trio of siblings. One night, after observing the son of one of her patients physically abuse him, Elsie, Olivia, and Blaise have sex; the next morning, Blaise leaves Elsie for Olivia. Elsie mentally replays every moment of her friendship with Olivia, wondering when the affair began.
As Blaise grows increasingly desperate, Elsie decides to wire him about $5,000—nearly all of her savings—to help contribute to Olivia’s ransom. The same day, Gaspard’s daughter fires Elsie, saying that she needs someone less distracted to care for her father. Elsie is disappointed but resigned. The next morning, Blaise tells her that the kidnappers murdered Olivia after accepting the ransom. Elsie goes to Dédé’s to mourn the loss of her friend, but the club owner, who used to be one of Blaise’s best friends, tells her that Olivia is not only alive, but that Blaise and Olivia have absconded to Haiti together. Dédé reveals that Blaise scammed money out of him, too. Elsie gets drunk, and Dédé takes her home, revealing that he’s always loved her; the two have sex, which Elsie says will only happen once.
“Dosas” Analysis
As the opening story in the collection, “Dosas” establishes audience expectations of Danticat’s narrative style, which foregrounds her lived experience as a Haitian American immigrant. Perhaps the most significant element of this experience, for non-Haitian readers, is her use of Haitian Creole, the primary language spoken in Haiti. Throughout the story, Danticat incorporates words and phrases—such as “Ki lè” (3), “wi” (5), “Mesye,” (8), “vole yo” (13), and “bouki” (28)—without offering an English translation. The effect of this centers the Haitian language and experience: Danticat assumes that her audience will either understand the Creole terms, and therefore won’t need a translation, or will look them up, and gain a deeper understanding of Haitian culture. By foregrounding the Haitian language, and refusing to translate herself for non-Haitian audiences, Danticat implicitly argues for the importance of the Haitian perspective and Haitian stories in the literary community. The use of this narrative technique in this first story establishes audience expectations for the rest of the collection.
The title of the collection, Everything Inside, comes from “Dosas.” After leaving her position with Gaspard, Elsie moves into a small backyard studio and grows increasingly isolated. The “NOTHING INSIDE IS WORTH DYING FOR” (33) sign on her front door, which was left by a previous tenant and Elsie decides to leave up, is a symbol of this isolation. As a result of her betrayal by Blaise and Olivia, Elsie has withdrawn from the world and feels like she has no reason to continue forming relationships: the threatening sign is evidence that “she no longer wanted to make friends” (33). Equally important is the vandalized sign on the inside of the door, which reads “EVERYTHING INSIDE IS WORTHY DYING FOR” (33): whereas Elsie once had a full, busy life, “this one room was suddenly her everything. It was her entire world” (34). The shock of Olivia’s death, and the whiplash of learning that she was alive but had betrayed Elsie again, has caused Olivia to retreat fully into herself, her world shrinking to the size of her one-bedroom apartment. This emotional whiplash is also a sign of The Impossibility of Truly Knowing Others, and eventually, Elsie shifts the locus of her trust from people to the inside of her apartment that feels safe and trustworthy.
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By Edwidge Danticat
