The Gutting of Couffignal Analysis

The Gutting of Couffignal is a crime story written by Dashiell Hammet. It is about the robbing and stealing of bank, Jewelry stores and wedding presents on the island of Couffignal. Couffignal is a small island connected by a wooden bridge to the mainland. The main street contains bank, hotels, jewelry stores and other usual stores. The higher part of the road lives the owners and rulers of the island. One of the rulers, The Henderixson family is having a wedding and they hired a detective to guard the valuable wedding presents. However, the criminals used various strategies to steal the presents, but they did not succeed at the end. Consider the opening of the story, the story begins with a very detailed description of Couffignal Island, where the crime takes place in. The description offers the landscape and structure of the island, including the wooden bridge connecting between the island and the mainland, the cliff, the street and the buildings. The beginning sets up a clear image of the place, the purpose of giving such an image is to foreshadow and make the readers wonder about the escape route of the criminals. According to the island structure, there is really no way for the criminals to escape. This also starts to grab the reader’s interest since it foreshadows that it is hard for the criminals to escape, the readers might start thinking that maybe the criminals are people from the island who will just stay on the island after they have done the crime. The beginning also particularly describes the upper level people who are the owner and rulers of the island, and this automatically makes the readers think that the crime is going to be related and involved with these people. So the opening of the story is basically giving a general background information of the crime, and it gives some sort of hints to the reader of what is going to happen to grab the reader’s attention and interests. Consider the narrator, the narrator of the story is introduced