Death and Duck Season :: Broughton Duck Season Essays

Death and remit Sea male child In the short story Duck Season, T. Alan Broughton introduces an everyday family from upstate New York, during the windy, fall season. The protagonist, Gracie, is demise of cancer, while her conserve and children live in denial and try their best to carry on with their lives. Broughton uses the repeated structural device of flashback to depict a vivid token from the eyes of a l one(a)ly, fundament-ridden Gracie. In looking at this story from a structural criticism, it can be broken down into seven split that reinforce the theme Cherish the time with a loved one because it can end in an untimely manner. To begin, Gracie is lying in bed one morning and she describes the scenery through her window This fall had been signally mild, and all night the wind had shaken and battered the house, rive away the warm rainy weather (135). Sadly, Gracies only outlet to the orthogonal world is what she sees through her bedroom window and her memori es of when she was well. Broughton then uses flashback to introduce Gracies maintain Len. He is a mechanic by trade and stubborn by nature. The author describes the euphoria of duck hunting season as a symbol for the world of denial Len lives in, because he cannot face the fact that Gracie was dying of cancer. Once she had said to Len, Im going to die soon, Stop trying to pretend, but he looked at her as if she had betrayed him (136). Lens state of denial continues to be reinforced until the climax of the story. In the second part of the story, Broughton presents Len and Gracies three young children Georgie, Betsey, and Adele. He also presents Father Rivard, who later makes Len address the reality of Gracies dying. Broughton shows that the children are macrocosm taught to move on with their lives before Gracie even passes. They became uncomfortable in their mothers presence. She spy how relieved they were to turn and go (137). Then, Broughton employs irony in his fl ashback to liken Gracie to her son Georgie, all-alone in the schoolyard. Now all of them were that way, further and further away from her, and sometimes even the children seemed to look at her from a huge distance (137).