Alarming Disorder In Thomas Mann’s Disorder and Early Sorrow, he depicts a conventional German upper middle class household struggling to externally transform their characters to act as different people during a party, but their essence internally pulls them to revert to their old selves. Similarly, the narrator and his wife in John Cheever’s The Fourth Alarm are confronted with accepting a new lifestyle that seems to tear their family apart. Each story follows …showed first 75 words of 1616 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1616 total…presence of the licentious acts of others. Both could not accept the change that was to come upon them, and both longed to return to the way their past relations were with their loved ones. This means that in order for one to adapt to a new environment, he or she must be able to accept and implement necessary and fundamental changes, or else remain longing for what once was and could never be again.