Analysis of short story

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"55 Miles To The Gas Pump" - Text Analysis

The short story "55 Miles To The Gas Pump" by Annie Proulx is from a collection of short stories, the central theme of which is rural life in Wyoming. The story is a short third person narrative centred on the suicide of Rancher Croom and the discovery, by Mrs Croom, of the bodies of the women he murdered, meant to entertain an adult audience as such a sinister plot would be unsuitable for children.

The story seems like a spoken account of recent happenings, like a horror story being told in a bar. The style of each sentence, and so paragraph, being a long string of phrases and clauses is also similar to a string of thoughts. The register is informal and conversational and the lexis is similarly unpretentious:

"...That walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer..."

Such features add to the story's feeling of being a spoken account between familiar individuals.

The structure of the two long sentences is complicated and disorienting: for example, in the first sentence a series of noun phrases in apposition post-modify the proper