Lydia Peelle - Mule Killers Essay Example for Free

Lydia Peelle mule Killers EssayIn this short spirit level Mule Killers by Lydia Peele we meet three generations of a family, grandfather, father and news as well as the different women in the story. The story is told in present time by the son as a first mortal narrator, but almost everything in the story is a flashback of the fathers story about his youth.The story is constructed in parts you get introduced to the lives of the father and the grandfather with no introduction of what has happened before, and then, the story jumps to the end in the present, without letting the reader know what has happened in between and what will probably happen after the story ends. The story takes place on a farm on the countryside near Nashville in the Southeast of United States. Though the story, you get an impression of an uninvolved society where the church is central and people has got quiet and ordinary lives while they work hard to make a living from their farms.The language in Mu le Killers is observing, which we can see in the description of Eula ()her hair swept up off her neck, thick purple-black and shining, the other girls hanging limply down, onion paper pale() In the story we hear the father tell the son about the events that changed their lives how he met the mother of his son and also had to give up on his dreams of love and how the lovestory of what should have been innocent turned out to be the thing that shaped his future.The tragic love story represents the way the farmland was changed in the future. Firstly, the suspension from mules to tractors in the farming symbolises several things. For the grandfather, the shift to tractors and the following accident marks a new time that he does not accept and he does not take him. This we get an example of in this line youre gonna see a future I cant even stretch my discernment around. Not any of it. I cant even begin to imagine. For the father, the loss of his mule Orphan, which was one of the things that he really cared about represents the end of his babyhood. The mules is a symbol of the future and the killing of them is a bad sign for the future and also is the point of no return in this short story. The shift from child to grown-up is the main theme in this story, but also the fathers struggle to live up to his fathers ideals of what a man is, is an important aspect in the story.In his nerve-racking to be and act like a grown-up he supresses his fears and his sadness and also the things he love music and the mules. So its like he cannot trim these interests any longer. Another important theme in the short story is time. During the story you get a feeling of time passing by. The father goes from cosmos a young man to having a son, who is twice as old as the father was when the son was born, the farming changes and goes from using mulls to tractors.