The Long Run
“The Long Run” is the headline of the short story. However, this term is also mentioned in the short story itself: in the last part of the story, Halston mentions the term in his narration.
She summed it all up, you know, when she said that one way of finding out whether a risk is worth taking is not to take it, and then to see what one becomes in the long run, and draw one’s inferences. The long run – well, we’ve run it, she and I. I know what I’ve become, but that’s nothing to the misery of knowing what she’s become. She had to have some kind of life, and she married Reardon. (Wharton 324).
“The Long Run” tells the story of Halston and Paulina and how they made wrong decisions through their whole life. Well, the term “wrong” is maybe a too hard word to use, but nevertheless, they made the wrong decisions regarding the fact that they live a happy life spending their time together in a relationship with each other. They made these wrong decisions throughout the whole time they have known each other. Starting with Halston Merrick’s decision to not let Paulina leave her husband Philip Trant to spend the rest of her life together with him. Followed by Paulina’s decision to accept Halston’s instruction to go back to Philip. After Philips death, the way for them both to be happy would have been free, but here also Halston made the wrong decision: he wanted to ask her to marry him, but when he was at her house, he did not and left her without having asked her. Finally, the last wrong decision was Paulina’s when deciding to marry Reardon.
These decisions over a long period of time justifies the headline “The Long Run”. The decisions were made over a period of minimum about four years maybe more, because the Trants were away from New York for about two years, and a year after their return Trant got killed. Because Halston Merrick and Paulina were in contact over a few months before the Trants left New York, another year and maybe a few months more for the time after Philips death and the time when Halston finally meets Paulina again. To sum it up, one could say, that “The Long Run” defines the long period of about four to five years in which wrong decisions were made, which finally lead in an unhappy life for two people.
Sources:
Wharton, Edith. “The Long Run.” The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. Volume II. Ed. Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis. New York: A Charles Scribner´s Sons Book Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989. 301-324. Print.