"Owl Creek"
Peyton Farquar
First person
What is the main character's name?
Laurie
Who is the main character?
Albert
What is the name of the man who visits the niece and aunt?
Mr. Sappleton
Civil War
His kid
Who does Laurie's mother look for at the PTA meeting?
Charles' mother
What does the main character think happened to his goldfish?
No. It is part of his "nerve cure."
Flashback
How does the story end?
The wife and her sisters kill the husband.
What does this quote indicate about the mother?
“I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery school tot replaced by a long trousered, swaggering character,”
She is having a hard time with her son growing up and going off to school. She sees him as an innocent little boy.
What happened to the main character's mother?
She was electrocuted in the bath by a hairdryer.
"She was a self-possessed young woman," is used to describe Vera. What does "self-possessed" mean?
Confident
Mature
Self-assured
"As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly father downstream--nearer to safety."
How does this indicate the unreliability of the narrator?
He could not really hold his breath that long and he is not really floating downstream.
What is the cause of the narrator's unreliability in the story?
She is a wolf and believes her husband is too.
Who is Charles?
He does not exist.
What piece of evidence do the police show the narrator to prove that his step-father was innocent?
The hairdryer was made after his mother's death and could not have been used to kill her.
The aunt's husband and brothers.
Mr. Sappleton thinks they are ghosts.
Who is the narrator of the story?
What is the cause of the unreliability?
3rd person narrator.
The narrator withholds the information that the main character did not actually escape.
What is revealed about the husband by this quote:
"He was white all over then, like a worm's skin. And he turned his face. It was changing...got flatter and flatter."
He is turning into a human. He is a werewolf.
Who is the narrator and what is the cause of the unreliability?
She is gullible and believes the best of her son.
What is the form or structure of the story?
Who is the narrator?
Diary entries
Albert
Who is the narrator of the story and what is the cause of the unreliability?
3rd person narrator. Withholds the information that Vera is good at "romance at short notice" until the end of the story. (She likes to make up stories.)