The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse

“One day back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every imaginable kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room.”

This quote sets up the contrasting point of views between the older Aram who narrates the story and the nine-year-old Aram who experiences the events of the summer. The boy Aram is still filled with wonder and joy—he is not yet hardened by the realities of life, particularly life as an Armenian immigrant in California’s Central Valley. Life is still a “dream,” and the structure of the first sentence mirrors Aram’s sense of wonder and anticipation by constantly postponing the moment of revelation: It isn’t until midway through the sentence that the subject (Mourad) becomes clear, and the principal action (coming to Aram’s window) doesn’t happen the final phrase. It is because of Aram’s innocence that, unlike the others, he doesn’t view Mourad as strange and irrational.

“I knew my cousin Mourad couldn’t have bought the horse, and if he couldn’t have bought it he must have stolen it, and I refused to believe he had stolen it.

No member of the Garoghlanian family could be any kind of a thief, let alone a horse thief.”

Nine-year-old Aram is experiencing cognitive dissonance. He knows that the family is renowned for its honesty, and he knows that his family is too poor to afford a horse. Therefore, he cannot believe his senses when his cousin Mourad arrives on a beautiful white horse that Aram knows couldn’t possibly be his.