For my essay analysis, I choose to do “The Painted Door” by Sinclair Ross because it’s a good story that shows just what you’re not supposed to do to your partner in life. Throughout this breakdown of “The Painted Door,” I’m going to focus on four key literary styles. The styles are as follows: Character Development, Pace, Word Choice and lastly the tone. I will be discussing the literary styles in the order above because in that order I think it offers the best way to understand the story that Sinclair Ross wrote. Keep in mind this story takes place on a farmland between a married farmers couple and a neighboring farmer.
So there aren’t many people around for anybody to really want to socialize with because of how far away each farmer’s from each other. The main character l’m going to focus on throughout this essay is Ann and what she’s put through while describing what literary styles are fitted best into “The Painted Door”. For my first literary style, I’ll be going over the character development and why it’s important to this story. Now the characters developments are important in this story “The Painted Door” because you need to know what happens in the beginning, middle and end of the main characters to understand the climax and its results.
The character I’m going to focus on is Ann the protagonist of “The Painted Door”. Ann’s the best choice for the protagonist because she’s the one character in the story that the author keeps coming back to, to worsen her situation further. For example, in the beginning, Ann’s described to the audience as the worried wife that doesn’t like to be alone, a quote that supports this is when Ann says “There was double wheel around the moon last night”, she countered presently “You said yourself we could expect a storm. It isn’t right to leave e here alone. Surely I’m as important as your father. ” (pg 366)
In the middle of “The Painted Door” Ann’s described as the wife who takes everything for granted and doesn’t know what she wants, a quote to support this is when Ann describes their living quarters. “If he’d listen to me sometimes and not be so stubborn we wouldn’t be living in still in a house like this. Seven years in two rooms – seven years and never a new stick of furniture…. There – as if another coat of paint could make it any different anyway. (pg ) That quote just goes to show how lonely, angry, sad and unhappy Ann’s, by this time in the story. Now by nearly the end of “The Painted Door” Ann’s situation has dramatically got worse because Steven their friend made it there finally, and John was still not back so Steven and Ann did something they’d both regret for the rest of their lives. A passage that describes this is when Ann’s described as saying “John was the man.
With him lay all the future. For tonight, slowly and contritely through the day and years to come, she would try to make amends. (pg ) That’s why I choose character development as one of my literary styles because it really shows how a character evolves through a story. Now I choose pace for my next literary style because pace really helped “The Painted Door” move from one point to the next, in a good time to keep you wondering what’s going to happen next. Now pace did this in such a fashion, that it left you guessing what would happen between John, Ann, and Steven in the end. It was a real challenge in the process of reading “The Painted Door” to know how it was going to end because of how much detail went into describing each character.
I felt as I was reading “The Painted Door” the author Sinclair Ross was writing very descriptive, with emphasis on mainly the atmosphere and plot development, to describe this story to the audience to keep us intrigued. A good example of the author doing that’s when, Ann goes to the window and unthaws it to look outside at a deadly storm as she’s worried about John, but also mad because he left her there alone and scared. That example is just one of many the author put in the story to keep us wanting to read more.
The final thing I would say that contributed to the pace was the writing style and word choice because they really determined how slow or fast you would read this story with the very descriptive words and style. Now I truly believe the word choice throughout “The Painted Door” is phenomenal, because the words used are really well fitted into this story when describing all the different aspects. Throughout this story, there are many different words that are truly used to emphasize critically emotional state that Ann’s going through with John.
If I had to choose one word that I think contributes to the tone, atmosphere, theme and character it would be “Alone”. That word’s used so much in “The Painted Door” it would have to be the word I choose, mainly because it connects to almost everything throughout this story. Alone has such a big impact to Ann in this short story because she’s left alone, for what seems like forever and while Ann’s alone for that time period she goes over everything in her marriage and that puts her into an emotional hardship.
Now “Alone” doesn’t just impact Ann it has a great impact on the theme, tone, and atmosphere in “The Painted Door”. The reason I say that’s because “Alone” contributes to the atmosphere, theme, and tone of “The Painted Door” because throughout the whole story Ann’s always alone, which tells us that the atmosphere is centered around Ann being alone but also has big impact on the theme and tone because in “The Painted Door” the theme and tone is based around Ann being the wife who’s always alone and going through an emotional hardship all the time.
That’s why word choice had such a big influence on everything going on in “The Painted Door”. Throughout this story, I believe the tone’s one of the most important literary styles to consider. The reason I’d say that’s because all of the other literary styles build up into the tone and or theme of “The Painted Door”. During “The Painted Door” there are lots of emotional chords that are hit quite rapidly to portray the theme of the story worsening. The theme of this story is set around a farmer’s wife who gets emotionally lost throughout and doesn’t know if she can recover.
What I believe is the coolest part about the tone in “The Painted Door” is the voice over aspect. Now saying that the reason I think that’s because when you read this story aloud it gives the story its own personification because it’s coming from your mouth rather than the authors or narrators. Now the author, Sinclair Ross in my opinion was trying to portray the attitude of “The Painted Door” in a way that’s meant to tell you that what the wife did to the husband was devastating, and that the husband John was only ever trying to give the wife Ann what John thought Ann deserved and no less.
In the end, I concluded that the four literary styles I identified in “The Painted Door” were probably the four that really set this story up in a great way. I believe that the character development, pace, word choice, and tone were really good literary styles for the author Sinclair Ross to put in “The Painted Door, Now saying that makes me believe that those four literary styles made “the Painted Door” a fantastic short story because it really digs into the story, to show you just how hard it’s to recover from something as serious as to what happened to John, ann and steven.
Now for the effectiveness of the author’s choices of style and wording I think were phenomenal because there was never a dull moment when reading “The Painted Door” and it was always climbing to the climax until the last word of the story. Now after reading “The Painted Door” I would seriously recommend that anyone who hasn’t read this short story to get it while they can because it really opens up your eyes in a good way. Therefore I concluded that all of Sinclair Ross’s stylistic choices were great and a set this story apart from others.
