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In Sherwood Anderson's short story "Death in the Woods," we find that the truth of the story is particularly questionable. The narrator essentially recreates the entire story initially sparked by one incident in his childhood where he and his brother see an old woman's corpse in the woods. Anderson's skillful use of narration, point of view, and folklore in the story all contribute in piecing together an otherwise incomplete story, ultimately resulting in something closer to closure for the now adult narrator who is striving for a meaning much deeper than what appears on the surface. The narrator, now an adult but at the time of the event only a boy, recollects the story and its occurrences in a first person narrative. Almost immediately telling us that this is just a story, the narrator continues on. What appears to be an all-knowing narrative style is not clarified until near the end when he tells us that these are "fragments [that] had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards" (Anderson 56). He also reveals shortly after that "the whole thing, the story of the old women's death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood" (56). He leaves us puzzled and bewildered as to how he was able to accumulate so many pieces making the story seemingly complete. There is obviously no possibility of the narrator knowing about all of the events that he tells us occurred, especially those times when the woman was alone. He does tell us that there are other versions of this same story, one that his brother told, for example, that night after they saw the old women dead in the woods. "I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I" (56) tells the narrator in reference to his brother's recollection. It is only after his own experience of life and fragmentary recollections of the women and her death that he is able to complete the story with meaning. The narration, although presumably forthright, is on the contrary a complicated string of formulated events and scenarios strung from a single true and witnessed episode, in an effort to reveal a much deeper message of "completeness." The narrators' point of view also plays a significant role in the telling of the story. He recounts a story from his point of view and fills in the gaps with interesting episodes taken from his own life. As noted earlier, his brother was not able to understand the point, due in part to his immaturity. He was too young at that time to be able to grasp the essence that the narrator now imposes. It is clear that now, with age and maturity, the narrator sees the entire event much differently, in a way that would never leave him. This impact is so strong that we find the narrator referring to and connecting parts of his "fabricated" story to events that occurred in his own life, events that only the narrator could reflect on by virtue of him being there. The time that he "saw a pack of wolves just like that. The dogs were waiting for me to die as they had waited for the old women that night when I was a child, but when it happened...

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Anderson, Sherwood. "Death in the Woods" The Story and Its Writer, 5th edition. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. 48-56.

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