Mule Killers Essay

1073 Words5 Pages
Mule Killers Progress. A positive noun, which relates to improvement and growth. Due to the industrialization, a major part of the farming society had to make progress whether they liked it or not. How does progress change our lives? In this American short story by Linda Peele, published in 2004, the central themes are the complications of growing up and the adaptation the industrialization caused – and forced. Besides this, Mule Killers is a tragically story about unreturned love. * The story is a first person’s, nonomniscient narrator and is told by a son whose father reveals some of his secrets. While weeding the garden, the father recollects his youth, which makes the father the main character of the short story which mainly is a flashback. The setting is in a farming area in America at the time where modern machinery reached the farms in Nashville. Tractors started to take over the farming and were therefore setting mules out of work. The narrator’s grandfather “…goes to Nashville and buys two International Harvester tractors for eighteen hundred dollars, cash… ” . The father is in the sons telling an 18-year-old teenager, meaning that he is uncertain and confused about growing up, and with small ability to express his feelings towards other people. The uncertainty and suppression of his feelings will later in the short story have critical consequences as he manages to make a young girl pregnant - without wanting to marry her. The father was imaging that he was with Eula, a girl from the town whom he loved – unfortunately for the father the love was not returned. The above-mentioned episode takes place just after another episode where the father, in an attempt to make Eula jealous, dates another girl. However, the plan does not work out and the fact that they have sex in the dark of the hayloft could be seen as an act of desperation from the
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