| “Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn’t smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was.” Thus we are introduced to the neurotic mind of one of the main characters in “The Falls,” a short story by George Saunders published in 1996. The story follows two men—Morse and Cummings—as they stroll separately around their town and suddenly face an emergency: two girls floating in a canoe, without an oar, down a dangerous stretch of river. Morse, a sad-sack husband and father of two, is frustrated by his shortcomings and longs for a moment in the sun. Cummings, a self-obsessed dreamer, is convinced of his own greatness, despite his approaching fortieth birthday and continued cohabitation with his mother. The characters’ contrasting internal ramblings swerve sharply as they confront their moral dilemma. (“He hoped several sweaty, decisive men were already on the scene and that one of them would send him off to make a phone call,” Saunders writes, of Morse.) “The Falls” contains all the wit and ennui of a classic Saunders story, and it calls on the reader to empathize with the pitiable, if somewhat frustrating, men at its center. Will they transcend their self-absorption, forget their personal hang-ups, and perform an act of heroism? The better question, perhaps, is: Can they? As the story concludes, we ask these questions of Morse and Cummings, and we ask them of ourselves. | 
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