A Stir Of Echoes Analysis

Getting to know someone involves spending time with the desired new person, talking to them, and/or observing how their actions. It would be somewhat difficult to learn about their character without those factors. We learn about characters in books in just about the same way we learn about them in the real world, by interacting with them in some manner. The difference between reality and books, though, is the middle man between the reader and the characters, the narrator. The narrator gives us everything we know about the characters, and sometimes their selves depending on the type of narrator. The narrator in “A Stir of Echoes” is a limited first-person narrator because it is told from one person’s point-of-view. Tom Wallace is the name of …show more content…
Tom is the only access to any character other than himself, so the range of information we have of someone is based solely on the amount of time Tom spends with them. Anne, Tom’s wife, is the character we know the most about and the character who shows the most development next to Tom. “Anne met me in the kitchen doorway with a smile and a kiss.” From that little sentence, we learn right from the beginning about how loving Tom and Anne’s marriage is. The narrator’s choice of pairing the smile and the kiss together gives an image of joy and love from Anne about being his wife. Nurturing is another way to describe Anne from the way she takes care of her children, and for her concerns about her husband. “What am I doing to you? I should be helping you, not fighting you.” Anne wants to be mad at Tom about his new psychic powers, but due to the wife and the person she is, she just can’t. She can’t throw away her wifely duties of taking care of her husband without feeling horrible about it. Even when she leaves town without Tom and furious at him, she still makes sure to call and check up on him. Throughout this story we see Anne be a good wife and mother to her family, be kind to her neighbors even when she doesn’t like them so much, go through the emotions of sadness, anger, joy; but all this is made known to us through Tom. Without him we wouldn’t know as much about