The Manipulation Of Truth In “Death In The Wo Essay, Research Paper
In Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Death in the Woods,” we find that the truth of the story is particularly questionable. The narrator essentially recreates the entire story initially sparked by one incident in his childhood where he and his brother see an old woman’s corpse in the woods. Anderson’s skillful use of narration, point of view, and folklore in the story all contribute in piecing together an otherwise incomplete story, ultimately resulting in something closer to closure for the now adult narrator who is striving for a meaning much deeper than what appears on the surface. The narrator, now an adult but at the time of the event only a boy, recollects the story and its occurrences in a first person narrative. Almost immediately telling us that this is just a story, the narrator continues on. What appears to be an all-knowing narrative style is not clarified until near the end when he tells us that these are “fragments [that] had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards” (Anderson 56). He also reveals shortly after that “the whole thing, the story of the old women’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood” (56). He leaves us puzzled and bewildered as to how he was able to accumulate so many pieces making the story seemingly complete. There is obviously no possibility of the narrator knowing about all of the events that he tells us occurred, especially those times when the woman was alone. He does tell us that there are other versions of this same story, one that his brother told, for example, that night after they saw the old women dead in the woods. “I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I” (56) tells the narrator in reference to his brother’s recollection. It is only after his own experience of life and fragmentary recollections of the women and her death that he is able to complete the story with meaning. The narration, although presumably forthright, is on the contrary a complicated string of formulated events and scenarios strung from a single true and witnessed episode, in an effort to reveal a much deeper message of “completeness.” The narrators’ point of view also plays a significant role in the telling of the story. He recounts a story from his point of view and fills in the gaps with interesting episodes taken from his own life. As noted earlier, his brother was not able to understand the point, due in part to his immaturity. He was too young at that time to be able to grasp the essence that the narrator now imposes. It is clear that now, with age and maturity, the narrator sees the entire event much differently, in a way that would never leave him. This impact is so strong that we find the narrator referring to and connecting parts of his “fabricated” story to events that occurred in his own life, events that only the narrator could reflect on by virtue of him being there. The time that he “saw a pack of wolves just like that. The dogs were waiting for me to die as they had waited for the old women that night when I was a child, but when it happened to me I was a young man and had no intention whatever of dying” (33). Neither his brother nor any other teller of this story would be able to make these same connections. Another example of this association with his own life is near the end where he tells how “[he] worked on the farm of a German. The hired-girl was afraid of her employer. The farmer’s wife hated her” (56). He, in a very subtle way, hints to the reader the logic in his manipulation of the truth and his methods of dealing with otherwise unanswerable questions. The connection between Mrs. Grimes being bound to a German farmer and the narrators’ own experience with a hired-girl afraid of her German employer is no coincidence. When taking this into perspective we find that the story is intentionally dubious because the story is actually about him as well as by him. The old women and her story had actually been insignificant, but then again had his experience also been insignificant? He attempts through his point of view to substantiate and give his own life meaning, just as he had given the old woman’s life meaning and purpose beyond that of a “feeder of animals.”
The meanings and purposes of stories and the lives depicted in those stories are likely to change as a writer reworks an earlier piece. Just as myths and tales were told orally in folklore, changing at least slightly from one teller to the next and often even changing when told more than once by the same teller, we find this story compelled by the same characteristics, both in actuality as well as in the story itself. This particular story is said to have been rewritten a dozen or so times by Sherwood Anderson, three of the previous unpublished editions have since surfaced and are said to all have a considerably varied style and message. It is more than coincidence that the narrator ends the story with this last paragraph–”I shall not try to emphasize the point. I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again (56). This last line is so very perfect in that it mirrors Anderson’s actually writing of the story. In a literary sense we see in the very first sentence of the story “She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which I lived” (48) we get a sense of this folkloric style. The narrator tells us that “it is a story” (48) and continues through its entirety with very little dialogue, just as a tale is often told. This is much more than a story about an old woman that happens to die in the woods on the way home from town. We find here a willed creation by the narrator of the story based on one event in her life where he happened to be present. It is an attempt for him to come to terms with himself and his own life in hopes of discovering something greater than reality. Just as his story gives “old” Mrs. Grimes’ life much more meaning than others had ever before seen, the narrators life is also magnified to something that brings him to peace with himself.
Anderson, Sherwood. “Death in the Woods” The Story and Its Writer, 5th edition. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. 48-56.