The story “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin is about a woman who thinks her husband is dead and she begins to go through the stages of grief along with hallucinations that things are happening that aren’t actually happening. The main character basically is married and she’s in love with him, having a great future for them in mind. Her friends then come over to the house to tell her that they think her husband died in an accident. She then goes to a room by herself and locks everybody out, sitting in a chair in front of an open window, and crying desperately. It’s also pointed out that she has heart problems and her friends wanted to give her the information delicately so she wouldn’t have a heart attack.
This entire story focuses heavily about how when you are in love, you have to face grief when your spouse passes away, especially whenever it is unexpected. What I’ve noticed while reading is that the writer loads this story with filler words and figurative language. The filler words is basically her reaching for elegant sounding descriptions of things, but it just sounds choppy and unappealing, also making it difficult to read. The figurative language in this story is the only saving grace of this story, even though it doesn’t make that much of a difference. During her time of crying hysterically and trying to comprehend that her husband is dead, she begins to convulse violently, like she’s having a heart attack. I believe that she started to have a heart attack while sitting down, but she managed to control the attack and calm down. Kate Chopin uses great descriptions in this time, making the reader think about everything they are reading, having to concentrate on every little word that was in the story. After the main character was finished with her grief and contemplation, she left the room and noticed that her friends were worried about her, their ears were against the door. After she talked with her friends for a bit, her husband entered the house and she died from a heart attack from seeing that he didn’t die.
I do not recommend this story. It was uninteresting and every character remained the same. All sentences had a bunch of filler words, reaching for very descriptive images and attempting to sound like an incredibly elegant and greatly descriptive writer. The plot of the story was very one-dimensional, and it was so boring to have to sit through and read. The ending was a very degrading ending for a reader. I didn’t like how the ending was so sudden and all it did was kill off the main character, a cheap cop out for someone who didn’t know how to actually end a story. It’s a disrespectful way to end a story, especially to the reader because the reader spent the entire time reading, hoping for a good plot and a great ending to summarize everything. This story did not give a good ending that gave the plot justice, it just killed the main character off while doing a plot twist that the husband was never dead. Again, not recommended.
