Analysis and Interpretation of “Mule Killers” by Lydia Peelle

Analysis and interpretation of “Mule Killers” by Lydia Peelle

Most people would say that love is a concept which will always be a mystery to man, because it is so changeable, and therefore it will always be able to fool and distort man’s thoughts. Love can both be happy and miserable, and this makes it very powerful and therefore able to control the entire behaviour of a person. Throughout a lifetime people will unavoidably experience things that will have a certain impact on the individual’s personality as well as further development. These experiences will often become memories that will follow them their entire life. This is also the case in “Mule Killers”, where a father tells his son about the memories he has of the year his son was conceived and his relationship to his father.
The narrator of the short story is a son who is retelling the story his father is telling him. Therefore the point of view is limited to the son, and the main character is the father. In the story we meet three import people who are from three different generations. A grandfather, his son, and his son. Both the narrator and his father are motherless, and the father therefore lived in a very small town on the family farm during his youth. The story that is told is mainly about how the 18-year-old father to-be struggled with his life and growing up in a small town. In the beginning of the text his feeling are described “trying hard to keep certain things stuffed deep inside his chest: things like fear, sadness, and uncertainty. He expects to outgrow all of these things very soon, and in the meantime, he works hard to keep them hidden.” He thinks that if he just denies these feelings long enough, they will disappear, and this shows us that his own feelings are strange to him, and that he thinks of his father as how a real man is supposed to be, since he never breaks down either. That means that the father is a role model for his motherless son, and this is also shown in the text where it is said that the son “carries (his father’s height) apologetically” He is aware of the fact that his father is older and wiser than himself.
Furthermore he is in love with a girl – Eula Parker. He sees her at church, where she sits with her rather boring friend, which in his eyes only benefits her. This you can also see in the text where he describes the two girls’ hair. “Her (Paula’s) hair swept up off her neck, thick purple-black and shining, the other girl’s hanging limply down, onion paper pale” But when he realizes that Eula not is in love with him, he tries to make her jealous by kissing her friend, and in an act of desperation he sleeps with her, pretending that she is his dream girl. These feelings can very much be compared to the poem “To His Lost Lover” by Simon Armitage. This poem is about someone’s lost lover, and Eula Parker is the father’s lost lover. These lines indicate what the father maybe is feeling. “He can turn things over, get down to that list of things that never happened, all of the lost unfinishable business.” And “Left unsaid some things he should have spoken, about the heart, where it hurt exactly and how often.” He did not get his love, he got the second best. But the narrator’s grandfather is not too pleased with this, perhaps because his son expresses that he wants to marry Eula and not the mother of his child. This is also an expression of the two worlds the father and the son live in. The story takes place in a time where agriculture is being modernized, and this also affects the farm where the two men live. As the title indicates the mules are being slaughtered because there is no need for them anymore. Now the farmers use tractors instead, because when one farm uses them, the others have to follow in order to still be competitive. Moreover one of the tractors bought by father’s father overturns on a hill and one of the hands is almost killed. After the shocking experience, the grandfather comes back to his son and says: “Son, you’re gonna see a future I can’t even stretch my mind around. Not any of it. I can’t even begin to imagine.” The grandfather finds the industrialization intimidating and overwhelming. These new machines are unknown to them. Like in the oil painting by Hans Smidth “Cart Drawn by Oxen on the Heath at Sunset. The Train Passes by” We have the romantic perspective of the situation in the first sentence of the title, and in the next we hear about the industrialization. And like the full dot divides the title in two, the real life is also divided in two, and through the romantic perspective these two are incompatible. The painting by Grant Wood “Stone city of Iowa” shows us a different kind of world. It is a much more developed society, with a windmill, a bridge and a beautiful horse. This picture is much more harmonious, and peaceful. This is probably how the son will experience the industrialization and the world when he grows up.