Analyse af Lydia Peelles novelle 'Mule Killers'

”Mule Killers” by Lydia Peelle published in “The O’Henry Prize Stories 2006.

The themes in this story are about unrequited love and its consequences. Another theme could be the change from child to adult. To make the right choices in life is what the main theme could be. The story is told by a son, he is retelling the story his father told him once. It was about how his mother and father had met each other. The father is telling his son about his secrets and his unhappy youth. Almost the entire story is about the father, which makes him the main character. In the story we meet three important people who are; a grandfather, his son, and his son. “…my father’s father goes to Nashville and buys two International Harvester tractors for eighteen hundred dollars, cash.”1 We also hear about two girls, which are Eula and her friend. We don’t know that much about Eula’s friend, but I remembered her as the girl with the onion pale hair. Eula had her hair swept up off her neck, thick purple-black and shining. “Her hair swept up off her neck, thick purple-black and shining, the other girl’s hanging limply down, onion paper pale.”2 The narrator is an omniscient and limited omniscient point of view, because he knows everything about the story. The story takes place at the time tractors started to take over the farming and therefore setting mules out of work. The picture “Stone City, Iowa” painted by Grant Wood gives me a good view of how it was back then, I understand it much better and it looks very peaceful. The narrator’s father’s story takes place when the father was eighteen years old. He was deeply in love with a girl named Eula Parker, but she didn’t love him back. She didn’t pay attention to him at all. That’s why he ends up with Eula’s friend, and gets her pregnant. So he had to marry her, even if he didn’t love her. In the garden, the father is telling his son about how he ended up with his mother, but even if he still doesn’t love her, they lived together and had a son, so the father must have learned to appreciate the woman he married.