Death

Through the narrator's time in the hospital, and his relationship with the little girl and the woman in the grey sweater, the author explores the ways in which no individual is immune to death's inevitability. At the start of the short story, the narrator begins his address to his son saying, "I've killed a person" (7). Though the reader has yet to understand what the narrator means, this confession immediately infuses the narrative with a sense of foreboding. In the passages that follow, the narrator begins to question the meaning of both life and death. He asks his son, "Does it make a difference if I killed a good person? A loved person? A valuable life? If it was a child" (7)? Though these questions do not reoccur verbatim later in the story, they establish the short story's subtextual thematic explorations. Indeed, all of the narrator's musings on...