Fiction and Right Thing

Stolpestad is a short story written by William Lychack in 2008. The short story takes place in a little town named Stolpestad. In this story we meet a man who works as a police officer1, one day he is called to a house where he is told that they have some problems with a dog. He goes there, and finds that the dog is sick, the mother asks him to shoot the dog, which he does after asking if they shouldn’t take it to the vet. While being at a bar after work his wife calls him telling him that there are some people at the house who wants to talk with him. He goes home and meets the dog’s owners, a boy and his father. The father is very upset, and makes the police officer feel guilty about shooting their dog, telling him that he didn’t kill it, and only left it there to suffer. The police officer feels guilty. The short story is chronological, though it has few flashbacks for example when he thinks back upon his childhood.

The main character is police officer, who has no name because of the way the story is written. He has always lived in Stolpestad, always in the same part of town.2 He seems to be a person who is not quite happy with his job, which we see in the way he thinks. He is kind of sarcastic, but also quite pessimistic.3 He doesn’t seem like a person who enjoys his life, and he finds it difficult to deal with the things he experiences at work, therefore he goes to a bar after work, and we get the picture that he goes there quite often since his wife, without him telling her that he is there, calls him at the bar. It is also kind of ironic that he, as a police officer, goes to a bar and drinks and then drives home afterwards4, but of course we are not told how much he exactly has been drinking. 
Besides the fact that he finds it difficult to deal with what his life is like, he is a loving and caring person. This we see when he goes to the boy’s house to take care of the dog. He wants to tell the boy that everything is going to be all right, and he tries to