The Race and Other Stories by Sinclair Ross

I am grateful to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Program Archives for allowing me to transcribe their tape of the broadcast of "Spike" and to Ernie Dick and the Sound Division of the Public Archives of Canada for providing me with the facilities to make the transcription. [...] Though the well as a symbol of vital, meaningful activity and shared love, and as a link between past and present, hope and disillusion, is more skilfully woven into the fabric of the novel, this first story shows us the early development of Ross's concern with the contrast between past and present, illusion and reality, a contrast that recurs throughout the canon. [...] The idea for "Jug and Bottle" occurred to Ross when, like the protagonist in the story, he mistakenly assumed early in his tour of duty in England that the words "Jug and Bottle" on a pub signified its name.4 The element of chance in this story of a suicidal young soldier is akin to the element of determinism in several of the prairie stories where an indifferent nature plays a large part in decid [...] There was a tang of snow in the wind, and the carrots and beets were still at the other end of the garden where she had finished with them. [...] And now, even as she stood over the vegetables, chafing and rebelling, an inner, unacknowledged vision showed her herself as she would be the next day, warped out of shape under the weight of two big pails of turnips, tramping back and forth all day long from the garden to the root-house.