Preview

Death by Scrabble by Charlie Fish Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
302 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Death by Scrabble by Charlie Fish Essay
Ironic game of death

In the short story Death By Scrabble, Charlie Fish tells a story of a bitter man who is contemplating killing his wife as they engage in a game of Scrabble. Throughout the game, the man notices that the words played on the board manifest into action. After he figures out the words played are coming true, he tries to play words so he can kill her. In the end, he ends up dying after his wife plays the word “death”.

The man expresses his extreme anger and resentment toward his wife throughout the story. The husband and wife seem to share mutual feelings of hatred. He tells himself that if the letters “give him a sign” he will kill her right then and there. He tries to manipulate the game so he can kill his wife but he is killed instead. The fact that he ultimately dies makes him a static character. Another reason he is to be considered a static character is that he did not gain any insight throughout the story. He failed to see that blaming his wife for is happiness won’t make him any happier.

The theme of the story is blame. The husband expresses throughout the duration of the story that he blames his wife for his misery. He fails to realize that she most likely possesses similar feelings of unhappiness. He reasons that if she were dead he would be happier. The central idea of the story is escapist. The husband wants to escape his marriage so badly that he plots to murder his wife. He blames her for his unhappiness and feels he can escape his misery by killing her. Sadly, the main character lacked the insight to see that other people cannot be to blame for your own

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Mid Term Film to Fiction

    • 2311 Words
    • 10 Pages

    1. A static character is a character which does not change during the course of a story. Sam Spade is a static character because by the end of the book The Maltese Falcon, Spade still seeks his own type of justice and he still retains within him a detachment to the world as seen when he has the police take Brigid away at the end.…

    • 2311 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    A Lesson Before Dying and Making a Murderer have many similarities. First, it all has to do with murder. Jefferson got accused of murder as well as Steven. They were both sent to jail after all but the only difference is Jefferson wasn’t in jail for long and got killed. Secondly, they were both accused of crime that they never did. Jefferson was a bystander of the whole situation in the book, the only problem was his was trying to take money and Liquor after the whole shooting situation, he didn’t kill anybody. Steven on the other hand was first accused with rape and served eighteen years in prison just for them to figure out it wasn’t him unlike Jefferson's first crime and only crime, Steven has two accusations. The murder acquisition is…

    • 185 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Imagine ending up an island that has a very bad reputation by all sailors. At first you think that it is not dangerous, but then you learn about what happens on the island. Rainsford and his friend Whitney were on a boat travelling to Rio. The short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell is a very suspenseful story that shows how Rainsford is very brilliant. Rainsford is on his boat when he falls off and lands in the water and he ends up swimming to the island nearby that all sailors hate sailing past. Rainsford is very smart because when he gets to the island he knows many tricks he learned from hunting for many years and he uses them to help him win against Zaroff. Rainsford shows he's smart throughout the story by creating…

    • 421 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Parenthood Movie Review

    • 907 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The main character had a terrible relationship with his father. They didn’t see eye to eye at all. The father just took him to baseball games and left him there with an usher that he paid to watch him. The absence of a father figure was significant to his childhood. When he grew up he tried to be anything but that memory. He was involved in his children’s lives. This would be a family theme where the parent separates themselves from the child, so they could attend to their own matters in life. The next theme can be seen in the family that has the young girl being feed information like a sponge ruining her childhood so she could get ahead intellectually. The parents did not see her as a child but as some sort of machine. It is not the proper way to raise a child. She was socially awkward and didn’t have the social skills to socialize with the other children at Kevin’s birthday party. This theme is where the parents treat the child as an object rather than a living being. The next one is in the single mom with the two kids. She struggles to support for her family and her children disrespect her all the time. The son was so distant from her and left all the time, while the daughter was in love with a troubled boy. The son was having problems with himself since she went through puberty and he didn’t have a father figure to explain all the changes in his body and while he was feeling certain things. Todd became that father figure when he married the boy’s sister and got to explain what was happening through experience. This helped out the single mother trying to support her two children. The youngest son and brother of Gil the main character displayed the same type of parenting as the grandfather did with Gil, abandoning his child and dumping him with whoever would take care of him.…

    • 907 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A life as a wife and/or a mother, is usually appreciated and is a happy life as well. A relationship between two people should consist of joy, commitment, responsibility, and most importantly love. For the two main characters in both stories ( “The Story of An Hour”, and “A Sorrowful Woman” ) this was not the case. The stories go against societies view with marriage roles and happiness.…

    • 817 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    There are many things that make you realize what the theme is in this story. The first thing that brings out the theme is the point of view from which the story is told. The narrator, who is the husband, talks from a first person point of view. Although, we being the readers of the story learn the valuable thematic lesson, the person that it is…

    • 1416 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the dictionary, character is defined as the aggregate of the features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing. This is what people look for in a person they read about in any kind of genre. There is no perfect character in a story. Every character has some kind of flaw in them that draws us in. This is called a tragic flaw. Tragic flaw is a flaw in the protagonist of a tragedy that brings the protagonist to their down fall. The tragic flaw is what causes the internal turmoil in our character in this particular story. In “Story of an Hour” (p.168-171) by Kate Chopin, the main character Louise Mallard suffers an internal turmoil when she finds out that her husband, Brently has just died. She first sees this as a huge upset then she realizes that she is now free of her husband, who she has never truly loved. Louise also had a heart condition so that “great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” (p.168) This is a major part of the story. At one point, the condition goes away. She realizes that her husband was part of the heart problem. Not only was the condition physical but also emotional. When she realizes that her husband has died she has a sense of being free physical but also emotional. She has conflicting emotions that she tells us about by her thoughts and actions rather then in dialogue. These are all traits that help us understand who Louise Mallard is and how she feels about the lost of her husband.…

    • 969 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Grant Wiggins is a teacher on a plantation that is asked to perform the difficult task of helping Jefferson…

    • 1514 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Story Of An Hour Analysis

    • 1472 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The author, Kate Chopin uses marriage to show how powerless women were compared to men during the late eighteen hundreds in her short story entitled, “The Story of An Hour “. At the beginning of the story the main character, Mrs. Louise Mallard has a heart condition. Due to her illness, her sister Josephine and her husband's friend Richards has the hard task to tell Louise that her husband Brently Mallard has died in a train wreck. During this first hour Mrs. Mallard experiences the sorrow of her husband's death and the loneliness she would feel, but also the conflicting and exciting feelings of being able to feel alive and the freedom she will have in the future being alone without her husband.…

    • 1472 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Role of Conflict

    • 1349 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The first element to discus is theme. In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin the theme is the self-independence of women. In the beginning of the story, the main character, Louise Mallard mourns over the death of her husband, Mallard. As the story progresses, Louise Mallard grows as she sees the new found freedom she has been given at the loss of her husband. “… she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence …” Though, at the end of the story it is brought to light that the death of Brent Mallard was false belief, and her idealism of being free is diminished. With this shock along with her heart problem, she died from a heart attack. It seems Louise feels her inner emotions are trapped and confined through her marriage, home and even heart. “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.” In the time this story takes place a woman’s independence is frowned upon and she probably felt forced into the marriage and having a man in her life instead of being independent and making her own decisions.…

    • 1349 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mrs. Mallard breaks down, crying fitfully, and locks herself in her bedroom. In the solitude of her room Mrs. Mallard understands the fundamental change taking place in her life. She sits in a chair, no longer crying, looking out the window the feeling of freedom interrupts her grieving. She begins to comprehend that she is joyful that her husband is dead. Feeling guilty she attempts to suppress the thought and fight it back at first. Then she succumbs to it, allowing it to sweep over her.…

    • 396 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In the story by Charles W. Chesnutt, "The Wife of His Youth, there are many different types of conflict. There is internal conflict amongst the characters, internal conflict, and conflict with society. The conflicts that Chesnutt raises in this story are not easy to relate to for everyone, but can easily bring to mind similar problems people face. The struggles that the main character faces are something people face on a daily basis.…

    • 2110 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Do you ever think about how a story can be really long and boring, well have you read “Contents of The Dead Man’s Pocket?” It may be long, but it is not boring. Jack Finny the author of the book “Contents of The Dead Man’s Pocket” is the kind of story you would not really be interested in but read anyways. The idea of this article is really that Tom may be a person who cares about a job and wife Clare, but tends to prioritize the two against each other in the wrong order just like in the story “you work too hard though, and too long” page 16.…

    • 727 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Death By Scrabble Essay

    • 604 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Another consequence of grudges, revenge and feuds are the feeling of aggression towards one another. In the short story, “Death By Scrabble” by Charlie Fish, a husband and wife are playing an intense game of scrabble on a hot summer day. The husband holds onto the grudge of loathing his wife and doing dull activities like playing scrabble on Sunday afternoons. During this game, the husband continues to contribute powerful and adverse words and comments about his wife. The text states “My cousin Harold swallowed a bee when he was nine, his throat swelled up and he dies. I hope that if they are bees, they fly into my wife’s throat… She plays SWEATIER, using all her letters. 24 points plus a 50 point bonus. If it wasn’t too hot to move, I would strangle her right now.” (Fish, 1) Here,…

    • 604 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    There are many themes in the story, such as marriage, jealousy and childish behavior. The genre is very comical as there is an exaggeration of the turmoil that can occur in a marriage. It can be seen that it is a short story by:…

    • 1155 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays