Death and Duck Season :: Broughton Duck Season Essays

Death and Duck Season In the short accounting Duck Season, T. Alan Broughton enters an everyday family from upstate New York, during the windy, come season. The protagonist, Gracie, is dying of cancer, date her husband and children live in denial and try their best to go for on with their lives. Broughton uses the repeated structural device of flashback to depict a realistic image from the eyes of a lonely, bed-ridden Gracie. In looking at this tale from a structural criticism, it can be broken down into seven parts that reinforce the theme Cherish the time with a love 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 unusually mild, but all night the wind had shaken and batter the house, ripping away(predicate) the warm rainy weather (135). Sadly, Gracies only exit to the outside world is what she sees through her bedroom window and her memories of whe n she was well. Broughton then uses flashback to introduce Gracies husband Len. He is a mechanic by trade and contumacious 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 occurrence that Gracie was dying of cancer. Once she had said to Len, Im going to die soon, Stop onerous 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 one-year-old 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 being taught to move on with their lives before Gracie even passes. They became uncomfortable in their mothers presence. She noticed how relieved they were to turn and go (137). Then, Broughton employs irony in his flashback to correspond 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 exceed (137).