Essay Questions

What narrative purpose does Kate fulfill?

Kate is the Pinner family’s longtime domestic servant who combines the work of a maid, cook and nurse for the dying Colonel along with probably a number of other essential domestic tasks which facilitate the running of an efficient home. The two sisters are wary of her presence, feeding on their own paranoia about the Colonel’s power to invest her with an outside importance aside from the reality that she has become indispensable to them because, quite simply, they don’t really know how to do anything for themselves. She fulfills a vital role in a story that examines the long-term consequences of psychological dependence and enabling as it becomes clear that even in the actual physical absence of a dominant controlling figure in their lives, these two women are almost bound to live out their lives in submissive dependence upon someone other than themselves.

“The Daughters of the Late Colonel” isn’t a short-short story, but it is hardly an unusually long short story, either, so why might the author have chosen to divide it into chapters or sections?

One structural purpose division into sections could serve is to clarify the leaps back and forth in time through the non-linear construction of the story. The problem with this interpretation is that very often two divided sections take place within the same period and on some occasions the final line of one section leads directly to the opening line of the next. A less utilitarian, but more aesthetic analysis would focus on the reader’s natural inclination to come to a stop—even if only figuratively—when they reach the end of a chapter or section. This creates a strange jolting sensation in those examples where the two divided sections bleed seamlessly into each other; the literary equivalent of being thrown forward in the passenger seat when the driver suddenly steps on the brake for no apparent reason. The effect has the consequential purpose of creating a pause or interruption where it needn’t be. One can easily extrapolate that the author purposely intended for the act of reading the story of two women whose ambitions have been constantly thwarted and whose lives by all rights should have been interrupted by their intrusive father for the very last time.

How does the story’s opening line encapsulate the predominant psychological reaction of the daughters to their death of their father?

Important information is missing from the opening line: “The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.” The reader is forced to wonder the week after…what? Except, of course, that the title seems to give away the answer, but even so it is a strangely jarring and off-putting opening line. The missing information just makes the sentence seem wrong, somehow; it almost seems as if there might have been a simple printing error. Of course, that’s ridiculous, because it soon enough becomes crystal clear why the actual even which happened a week earlier is not written down. Josephine and Constantia have been so thoroughly dominated and overwhelmed by their authoritarian father that they fear he may actually possess some sort of immortality; they remain frozen in time out of the irrational expectation that somehow he will miraculously come back from the dead so engage in a psychological defense mechanism of avoidance and denial.