Communication Styles In Olive Kitteridge

The novel Olive Kitteridge, written by Elizabeth Strout, is not what it appears to be. It is actually a collection of thirteen short stories, almost all of which contain Olive as a main character. The novel starts out with a story called “Pharmacy”. Olive is a main character and this chapter sets the tone on how she will tend to behave, and even brings forth the idea that Olive was unfaithful to her husband, Henry. Later in the novel, a story called, “Security,” has Olive as a main character. This story brings back the plot of Olive and the man she had an affair with from the first story, essentially bringing the novel full circle. However, a few of these stories do not take that same approach; there are a few chapters, like “The Piano Player”
As written in Selling Today: Creating Customer Value, “The patterns of behavior that others observe can be called communication style” (Manning 74). There are four different of communication styles: emotive, directive, reflective, and supportive. What defines these styles are dominance and sociability. “Sociability reflects the amount of control we exert over our emotional expressiveness” (Manning 78), while “Dominance can be defined as the tendency to control or prevail over others” (Manning
Instead, the main characters are a husband and wife, Bob and Jane Houlton, an older couple who, “had fun together these days...It was if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now this was their lovely dessert” (Strout 126). Again, Olive is mentioned when Jane notices her and Henry interacting in the church (Strout 129-130), but her lack of appearance does not take away from this chapter in the slightest. Readers discover later in the story that, at one point in their marriage, Bob had an affair with a woman who now lives in Miami. This affair demonstrates a clear pattern of characters in this novel who are unfaithful. Bob and Jane are talking with their daughter’s friend’s parents, the Lydia’s as they call them, and the Lydia’s innocently recall seeing Bob at an airport in Miami (Strout 132). This remark bothers Jane, as she does not remember Bob telling her that they ran into each other, let alone that he was in Miami. From how Jane starts to interrogate Bob on their car ride home, it becomes clear that Jane knew Bob had the affair years ago, and this may be a continuation of it. She has asked Bob over and over again to “Just tell [her].” and Bob finally breaks and