Final Paper

¶ … representation of Death and the impermanence in the short story "A Father's Story" by Andre Dubus, and the poem "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson. These two works were chosen because both speak of Death and impermanence, yet these authors employ different literary forms, characters, settings and plots. "A Father's Story" follows the format of a short story, being prose written in concise paragraphs with a main point or moral and portraying its characters by the way they speak. "Because I could not stop for Death" follows the form of poetry, being structured in shifted lines and using language to evoke imagination or emotion in the reader. In addition, the two writers substantively approach Death very differently. Comparison of these distinct forms shows how writers can make very different styles and statements about Death and impermanence through different devices, including but not limited to the short story and poetry.

Body

a. Comparison of the Forms of the Short Story and the Poem

A short story follows a classic form: it is brief, uses few characters, strives to prove a main point, and uses concise, pointed writing to move the story along quickly and to portray each character by the way he/she speaks (Moake, n.d.). However, within that basic format, the short story device allows a great deal of creativity and ranges all the way from "an entertainment convention" to a form of "high art" (Stein & Stein, 2012, p. 196). Andre Dubus, the author of "A Father's Story," was dedicated to the literary form called the short story. Dubus is quoted as saying, "I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice" (Bodwell, 2008). As might be expected, Dubus wrote numerous short stories and became known as a "writer's writer" (Bodwell, 2008). Dubus' "A Father's Story" follows the classic format of a short story, yet it is very creative.

A poem seems harder to define than a short story because poetry seems more ethereal. We know poetry when we see it but generally describing it can be difficult. Consequently, a brief definition seems to be the best starting point. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, poetry is "literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound and rhythm" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013). Formal poetry tends to be distinguished from prose, including the short story, in two ways: by its form on a page in balanced, shifted lines; by the way poetry is spoken, for according to Ben Johnson, "poetry speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013). Poetry lovers such as Paul Valery, a French poet, state that prose is "walking" while poetry is "dancing" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013). Consequently, poetry is still a member of the "literature family" but it has a very distinct and highly artistic form and treatment. Emily Dickinson, who is one of the most famous American poets, rarely left her home or had visitors. Many of her poems reflect her isolation and her loneliness (Academy of American Poets, 2013).

Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" follows those telltale aspects of poetry and can be sharply contrasted with Dubus' "A Father's Story." The poem is written in balanced and shifted lines while the short story is written in prose, in paragraphs that break down the story into pieces and contains a clear time frame. In addition, the poem is read aloud differently than the short story: Dickinson's work is read aloud as a lyrical, almost musically rhythmic, work; meanwhile, the short story is read just as one might read this paper. Furthermore, Dickinson's poem is more like artistically "dancing" than a Dubus' short story, because the poem doesn't take pains to explain Death as much: it relies on the reader's "imaginative awareness" or "emotional response" to the specific words she uses and the rhythm and the balanced lines; meanwhile, Dubus' short story reads like a parable containing a lesson or moral in which the father speaks of his morals as a Christian and how he lost them to protect his daughter (Smith, 2007). In sum, though "Because I could not stop for Death" and "A Father's Story" both deal with Death, the literary forms used are very different and are even treated differently when read aloud.

b. Comparison of the Substance, Characters, Settings and Plots of "A Father's Story" and "Because I could not stop for Death"

The manner in which Dubus and Dickinson substantively treat Death is also different. The main character in the story is the father who ignores his religious belief in order to protect his daughter from the consequences of killing a man with her car. However, in the poem "Because I could not stop for Death," the author displays how the main character accepted Death as a friend and a part of life until the end. The short story discuss the character's life before it yields into the talk of Death; however, the poem talks of Death right at the beginning of the poem. The two pieces of literature imply an acceptance of the inevitability of Death by both authors. Death, in these two pieces of literature, is more than just absence of the soul from the body. In the poem and the short story, there are three types of Death experiences represented: emotional Death, spiritual Death, and physical Death. Exploring these different kinds of Death experiences shows similarities and differences between the two pieces of literature. The inevitability of Death and the emotions involved are described in both of these pieces.

"A Father's Story" is a short story describing the life of Luke Ripley who is a Catholic. Ripley loses wife and children to an obviously bitter divorce. This represents an emotional Death experience in the story. He describes the feeling of loneliness and pain of being in the house all alone with no family. He explains the aggravation in knowing that, being a Catholic, he could not fill that void in his life with love of another woman because his faith teaches that he can't marry twice. He goes on and on about how good life was in the days when he and his wife Gloria were together and his family was intact. He speaks as if the life, hope, and simplicity of life left with his wife and children in that U-Haul all those years ago. Luke is dead emotionally he constantly lives with the regret that his marriage didn't work and he has to stay single for the rest of his life because of his faith (Smith, 2007). He confessed to the sin of fornication, which he admitted he willingly committed on two different occasions with two different women whom he did not love. Luke's emotional Death is triggered not by the divorce or the lack of a family life, but by the Catholic practice that once divorced, a Catholic believer can't remarry. This eliminated all hope of loving again or picking up the broken pieces of his life and moving on happily with someone else. Ripley's emotional Death is seen as clearly as his sharp sense of self-awareness throughout this short story (Smith, 2007).

Luke later describes the frustrations of trying to live up to the expectations of being a true Catholic. He explains that being a true Catholic is too hard and how he has never come across real saintliness, giving the synopsis that until the pope sells his house and everything in it, he would never respect a pope. He struggles trying to balance concentration in mass at St. John's Church and thinking about what other things are going on outside the church. This represents spiritual Death experience in the short story. Conversely to the open confession that being a real Catholic is too hard, it is obvious that he, because of ritual praying and habitual talking to God every morning that he has some kind of interest in knowing God on a personal level but because of the spiritual ineptitude, he is unable to live up to the standards that the Catholic church has set for the religion of Catholicism. His companionship with Father Paul is at risk because of his longing to love. He has a burning desire inside him to love and to be loved and that goes against what Father Paul and the Catholic Church teaches. Luke's longing to love despite what he's been taught to believe shows that he is spiritually dead because if he was spiritually alive and connected with the Spirit of God, he would obey the statutes that his religion teaches (Smith, 2007). In fact, at the end of the story when he vocalizes God speaking to him, Ripley gets bitter with God and says to God that if one of his sons would have come over due to the same circumstances that he would have met him at the crime scene with an ambulance. When God asks him why, he mocks Almighty God by saying essentially that any man could stand to see his son in pain and could stand there with pride as he took the whip and nails. He says with sarcasm that if God would have had a daughter, He couldn't have borne her passion (as if to say God doesn't know what it feels like to have a daughter). As God tells Luke that he loves in weakness, Luke defensively snaps back by saying, "…as you love me" (Clugston R.W., 2010). This shows us that Luke, in fact, is spiritually dead because he is unable to recognize with whom he is speaking.

A visit from Luke's daughter Jennifer, who comes home to visit her father more than any of her brothers, reveals that Jennifer had just caused the physical Death of a stranger. A night out drinking with friends became a tragic experience for Jennifer in the short story. Once Jennifer dropped her friends' home, she drove through the hills toward her father's house and she hit something that seemed to be a person. Upon her return home, Jennifer awakes her father to tell him of the accident. Luke calms his daughter down and tries to understand what has happened to her. She gives graphic detail about her driving experience including details about the weather before finally admitting to hitting something, or someone for that matter. Luke, being a seriously concerned and probably intoxicated father, goes out to the scene where Jennifer described the accident. He finds that it was a man that was hit by Jennifer and he was, in fact, dead. This is the physical Death experience represented in this story. Luke seems to have a bigger respect for the physical Death because he described himself as highly emotional when he sees that guy lying on the ground, face-down with one arm close to his body and his other arm extended from his shoulders. The description of the dead man was detailed so that without going any further, the reader could deduce that the guy was surely dead. Luke describes the guy as not having a pulse or heartbeat, having blood leaking from his mouth, and upon ear-to-chest listening, Luke describes the young man as having a gurgling water and air sound in his chest for a moment. The description of the young man was the description of physical Death.

The poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" opens by acknowledging the anonymity of Death, even as it humanizes the actions of Death by saying it stopped for her as another human being might stop for her. There is an absence of emotion from the character because of the uncontrolled nature of Death. The character who speaks from Death is emotionally dead because there is no use for emotions in Death. The character in the poem didn't cry, mourn, or lament one time but spoke in a tone of acceptance to the inevitability of Death. In the absence of emotions, the character spoke clearly on how she felt being dead. This represents the emotional Death experience in this poem. The character speaks of having to put away her labor and leisure, passing the school where the children played at recess, and passing the fields of gazing grain. She speaks from her own perspective and not once did she expound on any emotional feelings toward what she saw as she passed those places. The character, instead, imputes those emotions on the reader and the reader can feel what the character would feel about what was seen if she wasn't dead. The character almost pulls the emotions out of the reader (Joly, 2002).

There is a simple sense of hopelessness at the end of the poem when the author explains that the only stop they made was the stop at the grave plot which she describes as a house that seemed like a swelling of the ground. She explains that it has been centuries since they stopped there and yet each century seems shorter than the day she first concluded that she was riding through time and into eternity. She speaks with a tone of hopelessness because she obviously believes that where she is now is where she will always be. She describes her grave plot as a house, implying that she was now at her new home. There is no mention of God or any belief in a higher power in this poem, as opposed to the short story. Any believer in God knows that Death and the grave are merely conduits through which we pass from this life here on earth to the eternal life in Heaven or Hell, but to the character in this poem, the grave is where the buck stops. There is no hint of faith or belief in God or hope in the Resurrection from the grave which signifies the spiritual Death experience in this poem. The author doesn't speak of anything other than the grave as the ultimate resting place. The character says that each passing century is not as long as the day she realized that the horses were navigating her into eternity as if she dreaded that day that she'd be escorted into eternity by this undeniable gentleman caller (Joly, 2002).

The character, however creative she is in describing it, is dead. The entire poem is based on the inevitable Death of the character. This represents the physical Death experience. The poem doesn't get into detail about when, where, or how the character died but the final point of the poem was that the character, in fact, had actually died and was speaking first-hand about her physical Death experience, which was decorated and glazed with a wonderful word play. She explains in the first stanza that "…the carriage held but just ourselves and immortality" (Clugston, 2010). This verse implies the solitude of the physical Death experience and the fact that Death is a lonely experience meant for one person at a time. It implies that physical Death has no room for things accumulated in time by man and once Death comes for a person, that person can't take anything on the "carriage ride to eternity" (Clugston R.W., 2010). The character has a sense of respect for Death. Seeing as how she can't do anything about being dead anyway, she has no choice but to respect the arrival of her eternal escort. Physical Death is the most apparent experience in this poem and is the biggest part of the dissection of what the poem really represents or means.

"A Father's Story" and "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" both have some of the same tones and experiences by the characters. Though the differences in length are blindingly apparent, the meanings of both of these pieces of literature are similar in that by the conclusion of both of them; the reader will have acquired a mental picture of what Death actually is and ultimately how inevitable Death really is. The differences in the emotional Death experiences in the two pieces of literature are clear in that the character in the short story once knew emotional awakening until his wife divorced him and left with the kids in a U-Haul. That experience was followed by the emotional Death experience for Luke because he was a Catholic man taught to believe that he could never love or marry again after having married before. In the poem, the reader has to assume that the character knew emotional vitality at some point in her life because the poem opens with "Because I could not stop for Death…" (Clugston, 2010) implies that the character was enjoying her life. The fact that she couldn't stop for Death meant that she was too busy enjoying life and that she was enjoying it to the fullest. She later says how she had to "…put away my labor and my leisure too, for this civility" (Clugston, 2010). She had to stop enjoying the labors and leisure of life when Death came for her.

The differences in the spiritual Death experiences in these two pieces are also apparent because in the short story, Luke, although he confessed to not be a "real Catholic" (Smith, 2007), he still practiced some of the principles of the Catholic faith in that he followed the principle of marrying only once. He deemed the Catholic lifestyle "unable to be lived" (Smith 2007), in so many words. He was spiritually dead because although he wanted to find fulfillment the right way, at the end of the story he argues in arrogance with the very God who never spoke to him until that point. At the end of the story when he could hear God speaking to him, he insulted God by saying that He loved Luke in weakness. This was the seal that Luke was spiritually dead. On the other hand, in the poem, the character not once mentioned God or a belief in Him (or any deity for that matter) and the reader is left in the gray area on whether or not the character had any spiritual vitality before or after Death. The reader, again, can only assume that because she failed to mention anything of faith that she had none. This can be very misleading because even though no deity is mentioned, the reader still has to consider the fact that she mentions "eternity" (Dickerson, 2011). Eternity is forever in the absence of time but the author doesn't say where she is spending eternity. She only mentions that with each passing century, nothing is longer than the day she realized that her carriage ride was into eternity.