Red Literary Elements

Short story.

An imprecise thirty-year-long time span spread across the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century somewhere in the Samoan Islands.

Third-person point-of-view narration with the perspective gradually shifting from the skipper to Neilson.

The ironic tone grows relentlessly darker as the mood moves from wistfully nostalgic to corrosively bitter.

Protagonist: Neilson. Antagonist: the skipper.

Although it might be correct to identify Neilson/skipper as the protagonist/antagonist of the story, the conflict that arises is not a personal one between them. One might well make a strong argument that the protagonist/antagonist division actually works in the opposite way: skipper/Neilson. The real conflict lies entirely within the person of Neilson who invests so much of his life in contemplation of the past that he fails to appreciate the present and so winds up being completely devastated when the future does not play accordingly.

The story climaxes with the devastation that is rendered Neilson as a result of neither Red nor Sally recognizing the other after so many years apart.

The description of the skipper which reveals he possesses a “fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair” foreshadows the revelation that he is actually the “Red” of whom Neilson is speaking.

“Oh, three years afterwards she took up with another white man” an understated avoidance by Neilson of confessing that he is the white man she married.

Multiple allusions are that draw a parallel between Sally and Red and their island paradise and the Bible. “That is the love that Adam felt for Eve when he awoke and found her in the garden gazing at him with dewy eyes…A soul is a troublesome possession and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden."

The description of the schooner captained by the skipper can be interpreted as imagery that also describes the state of aging upon Red, who was once compared to Greek gods: “It was a seventy-ton schooner with paraffin auxiliary, and it ran, when there was no head wind, between four and five knots an hour. It was a bedraggled object; it had been painted white a very long time ago, but it was now dirty, dingy, and mottled.”

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“I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the life of somebody else” in which the cities and the college become metonymic terms for an entire life taking place there.

“The coconut trees came down to the water's edge, not in rows, but spaced out with an ordered formality. They were like a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, standing in affected attitudes with the simpering graces of a bygone age.”