In Susan Lohafer's chapter "Preclosure Basics in a Kate Chopin Story", she explores the way in which reader's find markers in text that trigger a sense of "whole-storyness". After evaluating her finding's on Kate Chopin's story "Aunt Lympy's Interference", she found that preclosure signals include "paragraph breaks, changes of space/time/condition, natural-event terminals, and image recursions" (Lohafer 27). Lohafer declares the first two, paragraph breaks and changes of space/time/condition, as retroactive signals which are only recognized after the reader has read past them. The second two, natural-event terminals and image recursions, are signals which "register within the preclosure sentence itself" (Lohafer 27-28). These signals refer to the "periods" that readers use to make all areas of time into something meaningful. This includes the human life span such as the journeys and visits throughout stories; arrival and departure and vice versa. A change of space/time/condition is noted through the departure that follows an arrival. Also, the reappearance of an image "closes a circuit" and sends an image recursion signal. Natural event terminals are the "most basic of the preclosure signals" and image-recursion signals are the least basic, as they are recognized by "more sophisticated readers" (Lohafer 29).
After going through "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and noting sentences that I thought could end the story, I noticed that each sentence I marked all fell in the same category of preclosure signals with the exception of one. I picked several, but stuck with about five that I felt were the most likely to serve as an ending to the story.
I first noted sentence 194 which reads "The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee" (O'Connor 1207). This follows the moment when the family in the story crashes their car because the grandmother had told them to travel down the dirt road in order to visit an old plantation house. This sentence falls into the category of the retroactive preclosure signals as it is both a sentence that precedes a paragraph break and it also is the end of an action at a particular time and place. I felt that this might be a good ending to the story because a conflict has developed, the grandmother made a mistake in turn harming the family, but there is really no resolution to the story. The Misfit has been introduced several times up to this point in the text, yet the family has yet to run into him.
The next sentence that I recognized as a possible ending for the story was 283. At this point the family has had their run in with The Misfit and the reader is slowly learning of their fate. The Misfit orders his accomplices to take Bailey, the grandmother's son, and John Wesley, the son of Bailey, to the back of the woods where they are later shot and killed. Sentence 283, which is a sentence preceding a paragraph break, is one that follows the moment when Bailey and John Wesley are being led to the back of the woods. Bailey shouts to his mother, "I'll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me" (O'Connor 1209)! This could be an ending not only because it precedes a paragraph break, but also because I feel as though it recognizes the fate of the man and his boy. Bailey and John Wesley will not return and at this point each member of the story, along with the reader recognizes this. This plea for his mother to wait for him seems to be an attempt to reassure her although she knows that he will not return.
As the grandmother attempts to win over The Misfit by continuously claiming him as a "good man", two pistol shots are heard from the woods. The reader and the characters of the story know what has happened. Bailey and John Wesley have been killed. In sentence 317, the grandmother, having recognized what just happened, calls out "Bailey boy!" This sentence, once again, precedes a paragraph break, but also signifies a change of condition. The man and the boy are gone, which further exemplifies the fate of the rest of the family. This change in condition increases the terror which the grandmother is facing and causes her to continue to try and recognize the "good man" the she claims The Misfit is.
Toward the end of the story, The Misfit seems to become angered by the grandmother's rambling. After having already shot Bailey, John Wesley, the mother and the daughter, June Star, the grandmother continues to make her pleas. As she reaches out to touch the man and recognizes him as "one of her own children", The Misfit retorts backwards and shoots the grandmother three times in the chest. "Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses to clean them" (O'Connor 1212). This sentence, sentence 391, precedes a paragraph break. It also is the end of an action, the life of the grandmother, which the events of the story have been leading up to. I felt that it would be a good place in which to end the story because it seems to evoke the emptiness that The Misfit conveys throughout the story. He has just brutally killed a poor old lady, and has nothing to do but resort to cleaning his glasses. He seems to feel nothing in regards to his actions.
Finally, in sentence 397, The Misfit is discussing the grandmother with his accomplices. He states that "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O'Connor 1212). Again, the sentence precedes a paragraph break, but I felt that it also was the end of an action and implied a natural-event terminal. The Misfit and his accomplices have just finished killing off each member of the family and are now talking over their feelings towards the events. Here, he has ended the life of the grandmother and lays his claim as to why she wasn't a good woman. Although it's not as clear cut as a physical arrival or departure, It seemed to me that The Misfit makes a departure from the actions that just took place. He recognizes that the grandmother, after all her talk of being a righteous individual, was actually not one. This departure can be seen as a sort of revelatory experience where The Misfit recognizes what makes a person good, and in doing so discovers that neither he nor the grandmother fall in this category. Because I recognized this as a moment of revelation, which short stories are so often focused around, I also recognized it as a good spot to end the story.
Each sentence that I chose, again with the exception of sentence 397, followed the retroactive preclosure signals. While reading my short story, I didn't necessarily recognize many areas of the text which could be defined as image recursions or natural-event terminals. Much of the story revolved around dialogue and because of this there were many instances where a paragraph break preceded a sentence which I felt was a suitable place to end the story. Sentence 397, which I did recognize as a natural-event terminal, was the third to last sentence of the story. This may have encouraged me to label this sentence as one of a conventional ending, but I did feel that it summed up the story well.
Lohafer, recognizes the ability to note recursion-signals within a story as the least basic of the preclosure signals and that only the trained reader can do so. If this is the case, then Lohafer might as well place me in her group of un-sophisticated high school readers. I only recognized the retroactive signals and the natural-event terminals which are "the most basic" of Lohafer's recognized preclosure signals. I felt that O'Connor's short story didn't entail the use of image recursions so much. However, Lohafer or any other reader might disagree.
Works Cited
Lohafer, Susan. "Chapter 2: Preclosure Basics in a Kate Chopin Story." 21-39. Print.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment