The story starts out with a man packing his stuff into a suitcase. He’s about to leave his previous girlfriend’s house. The woman tells the man that she is very glad that he is leaving, but he keeps packing. She picks up a picture of a baby, and the man tells her to bring it back to him. When he follows her, the woman has picked up the living baby, and then they start to fight about it. It ends with the man pulling very hard and the words: “In this manner, the issue was decided.”
The setting of the short story is the home of the soon-to-be divorced parents. We are told that the snow that is laying outside is starting to melt. A window in the home is in shoulder height, so it could easily be a house, also considered by the fact that is has a backyard.
We are introduced to two people: The he and the she – a woman and a man, and these are the main characters in the story while also being the only characters besides their baby. The tension between the man and woman is obvious since they are getting a divorce. Right from the beginning, they are arguing, and telling each other how much they hate one another. The baby is the thing between the two parents and is the one to start the real fight, which “decides the issue”. There is some kind of assumption that the baby is torn apart in the ending of the novel with the parents pulling in each arm.
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