The Management of Grief

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1988

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Literary Devices

Irony

There are two types of irony working in this story: situational and tonal. The first can be defined as the difference between the expected and the actual outcome of an event. One example of situational irony in this story lies in the feud: “We, who stayed out of politics and came halfway around the world to avoid religious and political feuding, have been the first in the New World to die from it” (195-196). Another, less tragic irony is in the fact that Bhave’s Indian parents happen to be non-religious. When visiting a temple with her mother, Bhave must keep her husband's “visitation” a secret. By contrast, she is able to commune more openly with her dead husband and sons in Toronto, a place that has more of a secular reputation than a mystical one.

Tonal irony is when there is a difference between a statement and its meaning. There are many small examples of tonal irony in this story, which serve to show the narrator’s detached yet overwhelmed state of mind. She exists—as she states of herself—"between two worlds" (189) and is therefore alert to absurdities and incongruities that other people around her don’t notice. One example is when, early in the story, she notices a white preacher on her living room television set; another mourner expresses indignation that this preacher is not mentioning the plane crash, and the narrator reflects: “I want to tell him we’re not that important” (180). She obviously does not mean this; her observation is rather a comment on the preacher’s privileged indifference to the suffering of her people.

Tone

While the situation in this story is serious and tragic, the narrator’s tone is often blunt and rather caustic. This serves to work against the seriousness of her situation and to make her episodes of grieving and spiritual communion more effective when they occur. For example, she walks into the ocean off of the coast of Ireland, half-hoping that she will discover her family’s remains there. It gives her narrative the texture of ordinary life, as well as extraordinary drama.

The narrator is often unsentimental about matters that are frequently sentimentalized, such as children and pregnancy. Early in the story, she notes that her neighbor Mrs. Sharma “looks so monstrously pregnant her baby must be days overdue” (179). Slightly later, she notes that a passing teenager is clearly the Sharma’s son, since “they have the same domed and dented foreheads” (179). These particularly ungenerous observations are unexpected, given that the narrator has just lost her own family. They indicate the narrator’s detached, artificially becalmed state of mind (she has been given Valium, in order to cope with her grief and shock) while also showing that ordinary life goes on around her.

Narrative Indirection

In this story we are often not told about significant events straight away but are rather introduced to them gradually. This indirection means that readers experience these events in the same confusing, swirling way that the narrator does. For example, we are not told right away that the narrator’s family has died in a plane crash but must rather piece this information together through indirect clues. There is the fact that the narrator is lying on her bed with neighbors in her house, who are obviously trying not to disturb her. The first mention of the plane crash comes when one of the neighbor’s teenaged sons announces that “it could be an accident or a terrorist bomb” (179).A few paragraphs later, the narrator states both that she has been given Valium and that she continually hears the screams and cries of her family.

The story is told in the present tense, which heightens its feeling of immediacy. Readers are not viewing these events from a perspective of time and distance. Rather, we are floundering for perspective along with the narrator, as she puts one foot in front of the other, tries to make sense of what has happened to her, and goes through the motions of bereavement. The purpose of the narrator’s voyages to Ireland and India, for example, is also not explained right away; the narrator simply announces, both to readers and to Judith Templeton, that there is “a long trip that we must all take” (184). The scene then switches to the Irish coast, near the site of the plane crash, as it turns out. Such sudden, unexplained shifts of scene give the story a slightly dreamlike feeling, and show the disjointed, unreal quality of the narrator’s days.