Ethan Heron Analysis

Ethan Heron
Storyteller Summary The story starts out with a girl in a jail cell. The reason she is in jail is unknown. She is looking out of the window and sees that the sun has stopped and doesn?t move anymore. She calls the jailer excitedly. He listens to her, then walks away uninterested. The girl begins to have random thoughts from her past. She thinks of her village and her cabin in her village. Also, she thinks about the last summer when she put red tin over the logs of the cabin. She thinks about her life in school where she was whipped for refusing to speak English. She also refused to become and part of a culture or speak any language that isn?t her native one (Yupik). It also talks about how the girl is tired of being stuck in the
house with her grandmother and what is described as ?the old man?. Neither of them seem to be in good health. By the time the girl comes back to the village at the end of the school year, her grandmother is dead. The next part of the story is a little bit closer to the present. The girl is now looking for a ?Gussuck? (white man) to have a relationship with. The old man tells her not to do this and tells her the story of the advance of a great bear. The next scene takes place in a local store. The girl meets the ?red-haired man? here. He was in the store socializing with some other white men. The girl and ?red-haired man? leave the store and go to his house together. While she is there, she sees a picture of a woman with a large dog on top of her pinned above his bed. The story now jumps back to when she was very young and her grandmother is still alive. She is asking her grandmother about how her parents died the morning after it happened.
The girl says that she saw ?something red?, which is referring to blood, in the grass near the bodies of her parents. Her grandmother tells her that her parents were sold poison, or bad alcohol, and they were found dead the next day. The shopkeeper that sold them the poison left town and escaped all punishments for their deaths. The story then jumps back to the time right after her grandmother dies. The old man is still going on about the advance of a great bear. He says that is bear is slowly but surely gaining on him. The girl leaves the house and goes to the store and gets the storekeeper to follow her out into the freezing cold. She runs out onto the iced-over river and, as she had planned, he falls through the thinner section of ice and dies. She is questioned by the state trooper and tells him that she killed the man. The last scene of the story is back where the story started, the girl in the jail cell. An attorney is visiting the girl and doesn?t understand why she is taking responsibility for the crime. There is people that are saying that the man simply fell through thin ice, and that the girl was not near him and so did not push him. But she doesn?t explain why she is taking the blame. The attorney doesn?t understand her and plans to defend
her as someone who is ?confused.? While all of this is happening, the old man has died and villagers appear with food for the girl, just like they did to the old man when her grandmother died. She has already begun storytelling by this time; she has become the new storyteller.