Paranoia Begins
Imagery is used throughout the text to reveal the way that Mrs. Burridge’s paranoia is beginning to completely consume. Early in the story, a passage describes an alteration in her routine that will prove significant. It stars when “she goes to the back door, opens it, and stands with her arms folded across her stomach, looking out…She isn’t sure what she is looking for, but she has the odd idea she may see something burning, smoke coming up from the horizon, a column of it or perhaps more than one column, off to the south. This is such a peculiar thought for her to have that she hasn’t told it to anyone else.” This developing ritual of looking across field of dead elm trees and the barn behind the house is unusually specific considering even she admits to herself she does not know what to expect and finds it so strange as to keep quiet about. The imagery foregrounds the developing paranoia while also foreshadowing how such compulsive behavior can be tangentially connected to reality.
Paranoia Solidifies
Later in the story, the passage above is revealed as foreshadowing. “One morning she goes to the back door and looks out and there are the columns of smoke, right where she’s been expecting to see them, off to the south. She calls Frank and they stand watching. The smoke is thick and black, oily, as though something has exploded.” What is significant about this imagery is that it describes what it is, to a certain degree, a self-fulfilling prophecy. She has been expecting for some unknown reason to one day see smoke rising behind the house, but her earlier experience was completely lacking in the detail about cause of the fire. When the smoke does come, she describes it only as if it could be the result of explosion, but there is no mention of actually hearing any explosion. Her paranoia is connecting all the dots here rather than the appearance of smoke itself.
Life of the Mind
“Mrs. Burridge sits at her kitchen table…The dogs are a problem. After some thought she unchains them… She walks north in her heavy boots, carrying her parka because it is not yet cold enough to put it on, and her package of food and the shotgun which she has taken care to load. She passes the cemetery where her father and mother and her grandmother and grandfather are buried…Shortening, she writes.” This passage is all contained within the same paragraph. The scene opens with the declarative statement that Mrs. Burridge is sitting at her kitchen table making out her grocery list. There is no break or transition between this description of her writing down “Oatmeal” on her list and the sudden realization of the problem presented by the dogs. Nor is there any break or transition between the recognition of this problem and the almost immediate move to unchain them and the trek past the cemetery. The paragraph finally comes to an end with the revelation that everything between writing down oatmeal and writing down shortening all took place only and entirely inside her mind. Thus, the imagery works on two levels as it illustrates both her state of mind as a burgeoning survivalist and as a deteriorating sufferer of paranoid delusions.
Writing a Story without Paper
At one level, Mrs. Burridge can be described as an imaginative writer crafting a story about a coming apocalyptic change in society. Her self-recognition even manifests itself as it would for a writer composing a story. An abstract shape sudden coalesces into the recognizable form of a campfire where “two men are crouching near it. They have seen her, too: one of them rises and comes towards her. His teeth bare, he is smiling; he thinks she will be easy, an old woman. He says something but she cannot imagine what it is, she does not know how people dressed like that would talk.” None of this is actually happening, though the narrator’s description makes it seem like it is. The self-reflexive recognition that she does not know how such people would talk is the only indication that none is actually happening and even at that, the narrative continues describing with increasing tension the coming showdown with the strangers. That she can conceive of men crouching in order to hide themselves and baring teeth in a savage predatory smile of imminent violence indicates that unlike with how such men talk, she is somehow quite familiar with this imagery. Her paranoia is unwittingly writing a story in her head without committing it to paper.
