The Telegram Essay

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Critical Analysis – The Telegram In the short story The Telegram the author, Iain Crichton Smith, shows how a character is not in harmony with her society. The woman in question is the ‘thin’ woman who is portrayed as being an outsider in the village. The author uses techniques, such as characterisation, setting and structure to show the extent the woman is not fitting in with the village she lives in and how this affects her and those around her when put under stress. The short story is set in WW1 in a small Scottish village. Two women of different characters and social standing are in the thin woman’s house by the front window, sitting watching and waiting for the delivery by the local elder, to one of the houses in the street, a telegram informing of a death of a loved one from the war. The story arrives at a climax when the elder walks past by all the houses and it is found that the bad news was actually for him telling of his own son’s death in the war. Crichton Smith makes effective use of characterisation to depict the dis-harmony with the ‘thin’ woman in the society that she lives in. At the start of the story, the use of imagery is used to show the contrasting characters. The ‘thin’ woman is ‘more aquiline, more gaunt…. like a buzzard’, whereas the fat woman is seen as more of a ‘domestic’ bird. The thin women is being characterised as being very different from the fat women appearing to be more of a scavenger, someone sitting on the outside, different from the rest of the society and not fitting in. Characterisation is also used to show that the thin woman was seen as socially different from those around her. When the fat woman offers a cup of tea and the thin woman drinks it ‘delicately’ and with ‘her little finger elegantly curled’ the fat woman finds it irritating and questions her on her mannerisms. The thin woman explains herself but it can
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