What value has the episode of the bird and the snake? What conditions make it an integral part of the action, not a forced parallel?
What details of setting and circumstance, and what traits in the boy combine to solicit your sympathy?
The little story is unified in character, place and time. It reveals by concrete symbol the significant phases of the struggle. It performs a tour de force in avoiding an extended analysis of the boy’s psychology. Even though the narrative is told from Frank’s “angle,” the reader knows what he thinks by what he does and says, rather than by the author’s analysis of his mental state. Further, the work makes a small contribution to literary history, since it is representative of a period of life in the Middle West, through which the author has passed; and it is reflected there now, to some extent. The fact that there is a strong vein of poetry throughout is because “poetry is found naturally in the life of a people who must struggle with a hard physical environment.”
AT THE END OF THE ROAD
Mr. Clayton Hamilton says in “A Manual of the Art of Fiction” (page 187), “—although the novel may be either realistic or romantic in general method, the short-story is almost of necessity obliged to be romantic. In the brief space allotted to him, it is practically impossible for the writer of short-stories to induce a general truth from particular, imagined facts imitated from actuality: it is far simpler to deduce the imagined details of the story from a central thesis, held securely in the author’s mind and suggested to the reader at the outset. It is a quicker process to think from the truth to facts than to think from facts to the truth.” And in illustration of his statement, he adds that Daudet and de Maupassant, who worked realistically in their novels, worked romantically in their contes, also that the great short-story writers of our own language have been, nearly all of them, romanticists—from Poe to Kipling.
With this interesting tenet in mind, look over all the realistic stories in the four volumes we are studying, and try to apply to each the same methods by which the romantic stories are studied. Does the application break down? How far can you follow it? Try, for example, to analyze the plot of “At the End of the Road” according to the type used again and again in this book.
Why is this story told in the first person? Try telling it in the third person, beginning that is, “The latter part of the summer found him tramping,” etc., and see what is lost.
Recall stories which have for setting a picnic ground, a fair ground, or other community gathering. Read Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit.” (In “Life’s Little Ironies.”) Why is such a setting good for many types of story—whether realistic, romantic, comic, tragic?
Who is the central figure in Mr. Muilenburg’s Iowa story? Would his story gain importance if detached from the subjectivity of the narrator—if the musings, observations and feelings were cut? What would happen to the whole narrative if such a change were made? Sum up the gist of the “story” in a few words.
What is the struggle? Wherein lies the human appeal?