The Man in the Well Resp.

Ira Sher's "The Man in the Well" is mysterious and frightening.  The children find a man trapped in a well while they are playing in an abandoned lot.  Without even speaking, the children, who are presumably about nine years old, decide that they will not help the man.  The author calls attention to this point, but also makes it seem like one of the most sensible decisions in the story.  The decision to leave a grown man in a well could be interpreted as displaying the cruelty of the young children- a disturbing but "fun" and "cheery" form of cruelty that takes me back to of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery".  In this case, the story would be about the cruelty of children, the false innocence that they can wear like a disguise, or the things children could do to adults if they had the higher ground.  The other way of interpreting the decision would be to examine what the man in the well represents.  He seems to be seen as a monster by the children instead of a man. The fact that we never see the man and there is never any dialogue between adults and the man leads me to believe the man could be imagined entirely by the children, or perhaps this is a commentary by Ira Sher on how adults often assume that children are imagining things, as this is most likely a conclusion that many readers will come to.  Most monsters are in dark, chilly places, such as under a bed or the back of a closet.  The bottom of the well is a perfect place for a monster.  Children are both fixated and utterly terrified of monsters.  There was some unspecified reason the children in the story kept returning to the well, even though they would most likely go running off in a panic and they were all so obviously scared and nervous around the well.  One possible explanation for the monster theory is that the parents of the children, who lived in walking distance and knew the children might play in the abandoned lot, conjured up a story about a monster who lives in the well to keep the children from going near the well and falling in.
Another interesting aspect of the story is how important anonymity was to both the children and the man.  In fact, we never do learn the narrator's name. Perhaps we can assume that it is Ira's point of view, but her name does not quite fit in with the other English names (David, Charles, Arthur, Wendy).  Not revealing their names had been "one of the rules"(118), and when Aaron discovered that his name had been discovered by the man, he felt betrayed enough to turn on the entire group.  The man in the well does not even have a face to put to the name, but he makes a big deal out of interrogating the children for their names, as well.  The two peculiar things the man from the well inquires are what their names are and whether it will rain.  I at first assumed that he was obsessed with the possibility of rain because he was thirsty, but the story's ending made me believe that the rain filled up the well and drowned the man or the man was able to swim up and out of the well.
Perhaps the strangest line in the story, and the one from which the most questions arise, is "but he wasn't going to help us now" (120).  This is after the man knows all of their names, and he is apparently now very much in control.  Knowing the children's  names gave him power of them.  Now the children needed help, but he was not going to give it to them.  Perhaps this is the beginning of his revenge on the children.  He asks, "Why didn't you tell anyone?"(120) and he seems so menacing to the children.  The abandoned lot becomes dark and the children are frightened.