Post 3

"Then in the afternoon of the eighth of October there was a sudden cry of pain from the room where they slept. Biff hurried upstairs. Within an hour they had taken Alice to the hospital and the doctor had removed from her a tumor almost the size of a newborn child. And then withing another hour Alice was dead."

          P. 122
     Death scenes are usually more drawn out and detailed, and seem to have a bigger impact on the reader. Alice's sickness and death took place in four sentences. I think McCullers was trying to show how the death was of so little significance by using such a short amount of time to describe it. Biff really wasn't that down in the dumps about his wife's death; he just continued to live his life, practically nothing changed at all. I didn't really feel bad about her death, either. Part of that was probably because Alice was not a very developed character. But be that as it may, it seemed almost irrelevant--I suppose that is why it only took one very short paragraph to cover.