The Angels By Tom Wolfe Analysis

Within the first couple sentences of “The Angels”, a short story by, Tom Wolfe, the element of anticipation is portrayed very early. A couple of sentences deeper, it seems that the wives of pilots are dismayed by “bad news”. Bad news can only mean one thing when it comes to pilots. A crash. The theme of the whole story can be figured quickly. The theme is death. Death is something almost every human being fears, simply because there is no way to prevent it. No matter how rich, poor, healthy, unhealthy, attractive, unattractive someone is, death will come. Jane and Pete were still in the midst of finding what love was about when Pete joined the Navy to eventually become a pilot. Controlling a huge aircraft, which runs on extremely flammable fuel, is an incredibly dangerous job. The pilots use terms as a substitute for crashing such as “augered in” or “crunched”. Jane overheard Pete discussing the terms with his squadron. The squadron was small so news, good or bad, traveled quickly. The title, “The Angels”, refers to the “death angels” which occurs when bad news is travelling amongst the pilots wives. No names are allowed to be released until a solemn Friend of Widows and Orphans tells the spouse personally. The first deceased of Pete’s squadron …show more content…
The pilots or, “Little Indians”, all put on their acclaimed bridge coats and sung the hymn of those is peril and hung the coats back up until they needed them again. At every funeral it was the same thing. Funerals in this story got repetitive. Although, that’s what the theme of death includes. The narrator slowly described the funerals less and less, because that’s how often death occurred. Once the bridge coats were brought out, it was implied that someone had passed. Almost all of the deaths in the story were violent, resulting in a carcass burned to a crisp. There was no peaceful deaths in this story because Wolfe wanted to convey how brutal flying could really