27 pages • 54 minutes read
Isaac AsimovThe Fun They Had
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Point of View
The story is narrated in the third-person limited omniscient (or close third) point of view from the perspective of Margie, an 11-year-old girl. Asimov’s narrative style is a fitting choice given the story’s original publication in a children’s newspaper. The story’s narrator has limited omniscience, making Margie’s perspective inherently unreliable. Given the story’s themes about how technology fails to account for and support human subjectivity, this is also an appropriate choice on the author’s part. Margie’s point of view allows for an exploration of inherently complex questions from a child’s simple perspective, which again meets the story’s thematic reminder to consider the simplest human elements among the lofty, progressive goals of technological advancement. This point of view is crucial in showing how technology must be moderated to ensure that human needs for connection and socialization are still met despite the changes to education and society effected by these technological advancements.
Conflict
Much of Margie’s conflict is internal (character versus self), expressed through her inner dialogue as she remembers her hatred of school, her frustration and boredom with the mechanical teacher, and her disappointment that she cannot please her mother.
Two key external conflicts develop the themes of The Consequences of Technological Advancement and Nostalgia for the Past. One conflict manifests through Margie’s perspective of the mechanical teacher (character versus technology). The other external conflict is caused by Tommy’s antagonism (character versus character). Tommy represents Margie’s only connection to something like a friend and her access to the book, the discovery of which is the story’s inciting conflict. Margie must navigate Tommy’s antagonism to realize her motivations for human connection and learning about a past that she finds to be far more appealing than her present. After her mother calls her into the isolated, alienating schoolroom, Margie’s resolution of the conflict returns to the internal sphere as she continues to process and integrate her newfound nostalgia for the schools of the past.
Juxtaposition
In juxtaposing elements from the past and the present, Asimov highlights the differences between the two in a way that explains how Margie’s feelings develop throughout the story. The book and the mechanical teacher, for instance, are both pieces of technology that allow for the preservation and access of knowledge. However, they exist in juxtaposition to one another because Margie associates one, the mechanical teacher, with tedium and frustration, and the other, the book, with novelty and excitement. When Margie learns that teachers used to be human, this creates another juxtaposition with the mechanical teacher in her mind, and again she idealizes the past version while dismissing the present one. The use of juxtaposition recurs throughout the story to exemplify Margie’s nostalgia for the past as a way of coping with a present reality that she finds unfulfilling.
Irony
The story’s title is a reference to the last paragraph in which Margie thinks about “how the kids must have loved it in the old days” and “the fun they had” (127). She assumes that because she hates the structure of school in her time, kids in the past must have loved doing school a different way. The irony here is, of course, that children in the past often hated school just as much as she does, though for different reasons. Communicating this is why Asimov chose to use this line as the title and as the last line. The irony of Margie’s mistaken assumptions about the past successfully unites the story’s themes about why it can be difficult to judge the pitfalls of progress against mistaken assumptions about the past.
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