Association in Blue by Christa Wolf, Research Paper Example

Associations in Blue by Christa Wolf is a remarkable short story about the color blue being presented in various area of our life and in completely different meanings as it applies to certain situation. This story is a whirlwind riposte to Neruda’s comment “Who was it that shouted with joy when blue was born?” Consequently, as the plot flows, the author demonstrates the reader what a meaningless question that was, thus using a positive frenzy of wordplay and metaphors. However, the author is not only showing us the positive notions of the color blue, but also points out the cases where this word is used to express grief sadness. Consequently, this whole story is a complete wordplay, which seems to be very hard to understand on the first glance, but sounds much better as you read through it and give it a though.

As I said, there is no single meaning for this color in the story, thus I will try to show how it is used differently and means different. In the story of Annemarie, her boyfriend says: “I am going to bring you the blue down from heaven.” In this particular case ‘blue’ means something precious, some kind of unusual present, which will apparently make her happy. Later on, it is said that blue color is the “color of faithfulness”. “Blue today, blue tomorrow, and blue again the day after that.” Again, it seems to me that Wolf wants to emphasize the eternity of this color and how it is used on everyday basis. When the author uses the word as “big blue surprise”, she wants to demonstrate how it can be unexpected and astonishing. Furthermore, the teacher in the story uses ‘blue’ saying: “I suppose you kids want a blue ink report to your parents.” In this case it sounds threatening and does not promise anything good for kids from this report. Later on the same teacher is talking about the war and “bluebottles flying around our guys ears”, thus making ‘blue’ a color of grief and death on the war. Wolf also shows us how ‘blue’ can be used in the case of poverty, telling about the “blue jacket sailor”, who “loved a girl but he had not a penny.” In this case this poverty led to breakup of the relationship between the sailor and his lovely girlfriend. Another case when ‘blue’ means ‘death’ is in the part with Madame X: “Her lips already looked quite blue. In a case like that, help always arrives too late.” Wolf means that when the lips are already blue, nothing already can help, thus ‘blue’ precedes death. On the other hand, ‘blue’ also means ‘truth’ and ‘trust’, like in the paragraph with a “blue arctic fox” given as a gift, and a woman thought that “a man like that cannot lie.” Blue was also the color of the packages of food dropped by Americans in Afghanistan, “so people can tell them apart from the yellow cluster bombs that they are dropping at the same time.” Here ‘blue’ is the color of salvation, life, help, and potential peace.

All in all, Christen Wolf has emphasized a number of meanings of the color ‘blue’ in this short story. We can follow it pretty easy, and notice how ‘blue’ means life, salvation, and trust in one case, and death and grief in another situation. However, I think the main idea of this whole story and a number of various hidden meanings of the color is simply the fact that color blue is everywhere around us, we feel and see it every day, but we just do not notice it.