"The Whippoorwills in the Hills" is what in literary terms is called an apology, which means it is a formal justification of actions taken by someone. In this case it is the firstperson narrator who becomes locked into a logical justification of what he has done, meaning that he must detail events as objectively as he can in an order that will be readily understood by his audience. The apology is doomed to fail if his readers cannot follow his logic. In "The Whippoorwills in the Hills," the apology is meant to be ironic; readers are supposed to draw conclusions other than those that the narrator draws because we see different meanings in the events he describes than he does.

This irony helps build the tension of the novelette because there remains until the conclusion the possibility that the narrator will break from his preconceived notions...