Contemporary Literature. Elements of Short Stories Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction

There are several characteristics that make up a good story. One of the most important elements of a short story specifically is a fully developed protagonist who can be seen to develop through the course of the story. Development of the protagonist developed enough for us to care about is essential if the reader is to have any reason for completing the story, but this development doesn’t necessarily have to be positive, nor does it need to be confined to the protagonist alone.

Despite the relatively short space in which these writers work, they are nevertheless able to create characters with sufficient depth to convey a particular theme. In the short stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, the characters are seen to be strangled by society finally finding release by mentally detaching from reality.

Comparison of stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the protagonist is never given a name, and her development is negative as she sinks into insanity as the story progresses. The entire story takes place within a single, yellow room on the upper floor of a Victorian country house. The woman recognizes something is wrong at the beginning of the story as she disagrees with the diagnosis of her husband and her doctor regarding her treatment for depression.

The two men determine she should be given plenty of rest and isolation as the best treatment. “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” Through the course of the story, the woman transforms from an individual who adores the outside and green growing things to becoming lost in the artificial world created by man as she obsesses over the grotesque pattern in the wallpaper of her room. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman, 1899).

Because she, like the women she imagines trapped within the wallpaper, cannot escape from the confining space in which she has been housed, the woman becomes completely insane, creeping around the walls after peeling the wallpaper off as high as she can reach in an attempt to find a way in to them. At the end, she even creeps over her husband, who has fainted against the wall, in order to continue her progress unimpeded. She no longer recognizes that there is something wrong with her actions.

The protagonist in Bierce’s story also suffers negative development as he lives through the final moments before he is hanged to death. This man is literally being strangled by society as the board beneath him drops and he falls to dangle under the bridge by the rope around his neck. “he was awakened … by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation” (Bierce, 5).

At this sense of suffocation, Peyton finds himself shifting into an alternate reality that only becomes clear in the end. During the moments it takes for him to actually die in the hangman’s noose, the character experiences an entire daring escape sequence based upon the only possible means of escape left available to him – the possibility that the rope might break and he could use the river to escape. Despite the fact that he is actually dying, part of his perception is related. “He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. … He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck” (6) while he believed himself in the river that he never actually touched.

Conclusion

The female protagonist in “Yellow Wallpaper” eventually determines that if she can’t free herself, she must find some means of joining the women within the wallpaper. By contrast, Peyton, discovering that he is finally and irrevocably unable to escape his present circumstances, is able to detach his mind enough to mentally live through a daring and nearly impossible escape before he dies. In both stories, the protagonist escapes their situation through the powers of their minds; however, they approach this ‘solution’ with different aims in mind – one to escape and the other to entrench.

Works Cited

Bierce, Ambrose. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Web.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Small & Maynard, 1899.