The Searchlight

The Searchlight tells us about an old lady in London, at the start of the Second World War, telling her friends an ambiguous and mysterious tale about her great-great-great-grandfather.


The old lady’s story is presented as a puzzle: unexpected revelations, details which bear no relation to the story told, reversals of the situation make the family tale become an odd riddle. To boot, the whole short story is focused on the lady’s story, the reader only pays attention to it and forgets the rest. It intensifies the will we have to find the solution and to make sense of the story.