The text under study is taken from the book “The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley” written by L.P. Hartley. Leslie Poles Hartley, an English novelist and the son of a solicitor was educated at Oxford’s College and for more than twenty years he was a fiction viewer for magazines. He wrote a lot of novels and made a great contribution to English fiction. “W.S.” was published posthumously in 1973.
The genre chosen by the writer dictates the adoption of the certain style. The genre of this text is the short detective story.
When we read this story, we learn everything from the author, so here we can observe the author’s point of view. This excerpt is very interesting from the form of narration: it is not homogeneous because the narration is often interrupted by the inner monologues and by the elements of description. Because of the big amount of such elements, the form of narration is descriptive. Also we can observe non-personal direct speech.
The main character of the story – Walter Streeter – gets one after another four postcards with messages from anonymous and starts thinking them over. His reaction on these postcards changes from the first to the last one. At first he was glad not to answer because he had a lot of things to do and the answering on such postcards required too much time and energy. But he was shocked and astonished about it, so he got rid of the first and the second one. Moreover, these postcards lingered in his mind and he pondered over the anonymous. He couldn’t understand who it was – a woman or a man because the handwriting and style of writing were extremely different.
If the first postcard was about Walter Streeter’s personal features of character about his grip with people, the second one told that he was on the border of something. Walter Streeter had the difficulties with his work and he needed a new source of inspiration.
After the receiving the third postcard he paid an attention on