Henry’s case spells out the indicators of “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” Joe explains, “She (Henry’s wife) went to see her folks half a year after she was married, and on her way back, on a Saturday evening, the Indians captured her within five miles of this place, and she's never been heard of since…Never has been sane an hour since. But he only gets bad when that time of year comes round. Then we begin to drop in here, three days before she's due, to encourage him up, and ask if he's heard from her, and Saturday we all come and fix up the house with flowers, and get everything ready for a dance. We've done it every year for nineteen years.”
Henry’s unconscious has enumerated the precise days that his wife perished. Therefore, during those days, he impulsively shifts his thoughts to his wife’s appearance. His support system is cognizant of the cyclic dynamic of his ailment that is why they turn up around the time to tame him so that his condition cannot deteriorate. The miners cannot persuade Henry against waiting on for her because it would shatter him, so, they put up with his letters and unrealistic affirmations to surge the prospect of calming him. The seasonality of Henry’s illness makes it expectable annually.
Consistent with the Lacanian criticism, Henry’s wife’s picture is an Objet petit a. The narrator recalls, “ knew I must be looking straight at the thing -- knew it from the pleasure issuing in invisible waves from him.” The picture gives Tom the delusion that she is still alive. When the narrator expresses his unlikelihood of meeting her, Henry “was back, with the picture case in his hand, and he held it open before me and said: "There, now, tell her to her face you could have stayed to see her, and you wouldn't." Henry is convinced that his wife’s picture can hear whatever the narrator wants to say because it is alive for him. Another noteworthy Objet petit a is the long-standing letter that Henry reads out, to the miners, to endorse that his wife will resurface.
