Question

The story “Departure” describes a character leaving home, and the passage from “Up the Coolly” describes a character returning home. Write an essay that analyzes how the narrators relate the events about the journeys in a manner that builds mystery and/or tension. Be sure to use support from both texts in developing your response.

Answer 1

The story “Departure” starts talking about George and the departure, but it does not tell the reader where George will go. The author describes each detail of the scenery which causes tension and mystery. “Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg, there is a great stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in town and drive homeward at evening along Trunion Pike…” The story also tells the reader a little bit of George’s past that relates to the places he looks at the moment. Further, in the story the reader learns a little about of George’s adventure, he is leaving a small town to go to a big city “Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city. It was a commonplace enough incident with him”.

The Story “Up the Coolly” also uses the description of scenery to build mystery and tension “It all swept back upon Howard in a flood of names and faces and sights and sounds; something sweet and stirring somehow, though it had little of aesthetic charms at the time”. When the main character returns to places, his memory brings him back to old days “Once they passed a little brook singing in a mournfully sweet way its eternal song over its pebbles. It called back to Howard the days when he and Grant, his younger brother, had fished in this little brook for trout…”

Further the reader learns that the main character left his town to become an actor “He had been wonderfully successful, and yet had carried into his success as a dramatic author as well as an actor” and as he approaches his brother’s house memories to come back with pleasure and excitement but also with the memory of how many times he said he would visit and did not.