Mule killers
Mule Killers
Lydia Peelle’s story Mule Killers is a story about unrequited love and its consequences and the change from child to adult - Growing up and entering a world of adulthood and of progress you experience both positive and negative things. In this short story we meet three generations of a family; the grandfather, the father and the son - as well as the different women in the story.
The story takes place on a farm, a garden, on the countryside near Nashville in the Southeast of United States. The father is telling his son the story about how he met his mother, so therefore most of the story works as a flashback of the father’s youth. This takes place in the time where the industrial revolution was arriving to the agriculture, and the author problematizes this progress, which you can already read by the title Mule killers. Though the story, you get an impression of an isolated society where the church is central and people has got quiet and ordinary lives while they work hard to make a living from their farms. The religiosity of the town becomes very clear when the grandfather tells his son that there’s only one right thing to do her – abortion is not a choice and of course they have to marry when the girls is pregnant.
The story is told in present time by the son as a first person narrator, but almost everything in the story is a flashback of the father’s story about his youth, therefore the main character is the father. The text is a frame story because of the way it has been composed. Lydia Peelle uses the flashback to give the reader a better understanding of the past. The story is constructed in parts; you get introduced to the lives of the father and the grandfather with no introduction of what has happened before, and then, the story jumps to the end in the present, without letting the reader know what has happened in between and what will probably happen after the story ends - Our protagonist is therefore the boy’s father.
The story that’s
Lydia Peelle’s story Mule Killers is a story about unrequited love and its consequences and the change from child to adult - Growing up and entering a world of adulthood and of progress you experience both positive and negative things. In this short story we meet three generations of a family; the grandfather, the father and the son - as well as the different women in the story.
The story takes place on a farm, a garden, on the countryside near Nashville in the Southeast of United States. The father is telling his son the story about how he met his mother, so therefore most of the story works as a flashback of the father’s youth. This takes place in the time where the industrial revolution was arriving to the agriculture, and the author problematizes this progress, which you can already read by the title Mule killers. Though the story, you get an impression of an isolated society where the church is central and people has got quiet and ordinary lives while they work hard to make a living from their farms. The religiosity of the town becomes very clear when the grandfather tells his son that there’s only one right thing to do her – abortion is not a choice and of course they have to marry when the girls is pregnant.
The story is told in present time by the son as a first person narrator, but almost everything in the story is a flashback of the father’s story about his youth, therefore the main character is the father. The text is a frame story because of the way it has been composed. Lydia Peelle uses the flashback to give the reader a better understanding of the past. The story is constructed in parts; you get introduced to the lives of the father and the grandfather with no introduction of what has happened before, and then, the story jumps to the end in the present, without letting the reader know what has happened in between and what will probably happen after the story ends - Our protagonist is therefore the boy’s father.
The story that’s