“Janus” Summary
Text Box: The story “Janus” involves the crucial choices people make regarding stability and passion, and how these choices play out in married life. The story’s protagonist, Andrea, is a real estate agent who spends her time using creative strategies to make her properties more appealing to buyers. For instance, she brings her dog to houses, prior to the showings, if the potential buyers are pet lovers. One of her strategies, and the primary focus of the story, involves a ceramic bowl. On a regular basis, Andrea brings the bowl to houses she is selling and makes it the primary accent of the living space. The bowl becomes the center of the story. The plot seems to diminish and is overtaken by the elaborate description of the bowl. Even though the bowl is plain and “subtle”, it seems to become “illuminated” and catches the eye of many potential buyers. Andrea recounts a time where she had left the bowl behind and feverishly rushed back to retrieve it. Her deep connection to the bowl is relayed in her comparing the forgetting of the bowl, to a parent leaving a child behind somewhere. As Andrea becomes increasingly successful in her career, her obsession with the bowl also increases. The bowl becomes her sole selling strategy due to her belief that it is the cause of her success. She grows anxious and fearful about something bad happening to the bowl, and carries immense guilt over keeping her fixation a secret from her husband. The end of the story jumps back a few years earlier to when Andrea first received the bowl. Here the reader is exposed to the source of the conflict: the bowl was one of the small gifts given to her by an ex-lover. Andrea recounts the time when her lover calls her out on being “two-faced” for wanting to keep both her marriage and her affair. Andrea’s inability to choose between these two lives leads to the climax, in which her lover leaves her. The story’s final image of Andrea looking at the empty bowl reveals a lack of resolution.