Short Story Fiction Packet Response #2

             A very interesting choice the writer made in the short story "Colonel", was the unemotional and monotonous tone created. The syntax found within "Colonel" is very terse and lacks a certain flow between every sentence. The writing comes across as very choppy. Every sentence is a bland statement describing some feature of the house or conversation that the narrator is involved in. This causes the short story to come across as very robotic and unemotional, as the syntax gives the impression that the narrator is very removed from the events going on. The syntax however changes during the last few sentences of the short story. The sentences are elongated. This causes the impact created by the Colonel's outburst to be much more impactful as in comparison, the rest of the short story is dull. 

I thought that the irony present in the short story “Wallet” was worth noting. The old man attempted to go to the department store in order to frustrate and interrupt the agenda of a criminal, yet the manner his plan is described makes him appear to be committing some crime of sorts. He has a getaway driver and the verb “case” has connotations of crime. He flees the scene when his deception is made known, although his intentions were altruistic. This irony adds a lighter tone to the short story, which is apparent in the way that the boy and old man reacted at the end: in a fit of laughter.

Lastly, I found the use of color to describe the woman in “But what was her name?” to be peculiar. The woman at the start is described as being the color blue when she was born, which is likely the cause of a cyanotic illness also causes heart issues. She is then described as having red feet when she is older, which is likely representative of her life as a stay-at-home wife filled with hard manual work. The ending is very peculiar. She is described as being white at birth when on her presumed death bed, as it says that her “past has taken hold of her—the heart’s last sleight”, which is referencing the heart issues that she has had since she was a child. She is speaking to her “father” at the end, which is assumed to be The Holy Father, God. Her death is considered a new birth into heaven. The color white is often associated with purity and holiness, so that is likely why the color white was described as her birth color at the end of the story. Overall, it is very interesting how the author used color’s to represent points in the woman’s life.