28 pages • 56 minutes read
The Red Convertible
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Literary Devices
Foreshadowing
Content Warning: This section contains references to war-related trauma.
The narrator’s full knowledge of the story allows for him to forecast events and shifts in mood. The most striking example is Henry’s boots. In the first paragraph, the narrator says his “boots filled with water on a windy night” when he bought out Lyman’s share (177). The strange detail is colorful but isn’t yet loaded with meaning; the reference is also somewhat hidden in the middle of a sentence. At the end of the story, the image returns in Henry’s last words, highlighted by their presence on their own line in quotation marks. The words make literal sense in the context of the final scene, but the déjà vu adds a level of strangeness. The boots are made both strange and familiar with their use in and out of context.
Subtler forms of foreshadowing underscore this strangeness and familiarity. Susy’s hair buns—the first thing Lyman notices about her—become her sweeping hair a page later when the brothers are saying goodbye, revisiting her lovely strangeness. Although Henry is smiling in the photograph, Lyman comes to see it as a dark and hollow expression, one that looks “like it might have hurt his face” (186). This observation turns the mood dark as the climactic scene of the story begins.
Point of View
The story is narrated in first person by the main character, Lyman Lamartine. Lyman is also a retrospective narrator, telling the story from the vantage point of the future. The story never catches up to the present, so he knows every event before it happens. First person grants the reader access to Lyman’s thoughts, feelings, and reflections in both the past and in the present. A first-person narrator could purposefully withhold information from the reader, but Lyman is a forthcoming storyteller. The intimacy of first-person narration and Lyman’s conversational speech also gesture toward oral storytelling, which is an important part of many Indigenous cultures and Indigenous Identity.
Voice
The syntax and diction of Lyman’s narration matches his regular speaking voice. His casual, sometimes quaint speech sometimes results in minor grammar quirks—for example, “real quiet” (183), “I lost it quick” (178). This makes the act of storytelling feel especially intimate and vulnerable and aims to endear the reader to the narrator from the beginning.
Lyman narrates in past tense with a few brief shifts into present tense. When Henry and Lyman pick up Susy, their dialogue is in present tense, indicated by the word “says” instead of “said.” The same shift occurs when the brothers look at the swollen Red River, and the story remains in present tense through the end. This tense shift isn’t meant to indicate literal time travel, as the narrator never leaves his point on the timeline. Rather, the narrator shifts when the moment becomes so real and immediate that he feels as if he is back in the memory. It is another manifestation of his raw narrative voice.
Catharsis
Rage, despair, and inner turmoil build in Lyman and Henry throughout the story until they erupt in cathartic action. Lyman’s frustration is especially obvious due to the use of first-person point of view. When Henry bites his lip while watching TV, Lyman wants to “smash that tube to pieces” (183). He can’t stand being alone, even when Henry is doing better, because he’s “such a loner now that [Lyman] didn’t know how to take it” (185). Lyman doesn’t know what Henry’s feeling when he returns home from war, but he can see the pain building, and it’s no surprise when the two of them have their cathartic moment on the banks of the river.
Henry’s catharsis comes in the form of the whooping dance. It is a raw expression of energy that Lyman can’t make sense of. Regardless, the release is joyful in and of itself, causing Lyman to laugh until it hurts. The serenity in Henry’s voice before he is swept away by the river may be in part due to this long-awaited catharsis.
Lyman’s catharsis comes in stages. He begins by confronting Henry as he withdraws again, shaking his brother and telling him to “wake up, wake up, wake up!” (187). His final catharsis occurs when he rolls the convertible into the river, staying until the battery goes dead. At the beginning of the story, the car was a sacred object—a symbol of his love for his brother. He commits sacrilege against the car to save his brother, and then he overcomes his regard for the car altogether in the very end, growing past his need for it.
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