"Inland Passage" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short Story Collection/Canadian Literature/LGBTQ Fiction

Primarily upper middle class homes in British Columbia, Canada although the collection is predominantly made up of tales in which the locale is not explicitly identified.

Various. While a few stories conveyed from the first-person point-of-view, the bulk of the stories are written from a third-person perspective.

The tone of most stories is conversational and leans toward light-hearted irony of a subtle sort. This tone is often at odds with the mood which more often than not drives forward a narrative with darker tones made implicit by the tone.

Protagonist: The outsider in mainstream society. Antagonist: The pressures within mainstream society for outsiders to conform to traditional roles and conventional expectations.

The conflict at the heart of the stories in this collection are predominantly domestic issues on the lower level of the anxiety spectrum. These are stories about ordinary people confronting the difficulties of navigating interpersonal relationships.

The collection as a whole is very much thematically concerned with the effects of aging and so it makes perfect sense that as a whole the stories move relentlessly toward the climax of the concluding story in which a female writer who was once popular enough to attain celebrity status is now in her seventies accepting the approach of death with grace and dignity.

Almost the entire narrative trek of the story “Joy” is foreshadowed in the extraordinary sentence with which the story commences: “I’m divorced and Derek’s never been married, but this isn’t a story about us so much as it is a story about Joy, who has by now acted out so many of our uncommitted errors that she is the only plot of our otherwise static relationship, if it can be called a relationship at all; neither of us has had the courage or the ignorance to be engaged.”

“A Chair for George” is such a masterpiece of subtly implied meaning that the full significance of the understated closing line cannot be conveyed by merely summarizing the plot. One has to read the whole thing—probably twice—to get at the hidden meaning of this understatement: “Well, you can’t trust a good idea, but you can still enjoy it when it works out.”

“Inland Passage” is filled with multiple pop culture allusions to Mighty Mouse, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Linus from the Peanuts comic strip, among others.

Just four paragraphs into the opening story—and extension the entire book—the author’s talent for crafting complex imagery is put on dazzling display: “Wilson C. Wilson…had been orphaned as a baby. That fact, accompanied by his dark good looks, had made him a romantic figure for me, but I had never expected him to climb up into our steep north slope of a garden where I made a habit of brooding on a favorite rock and often spying on him through the fringe of laurel, dogwood, mountain ash, and alder which grew, and still does grow, down at the street.”

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"One Can of Soup at a Time” is the collection’s shortest story, told almost entirely through that is partially dialogue constructed as a recurrence of parallel repetition: “And it’s been getting worse. There is nothing I can do, no minor, automatic, mindless, little gesture…” “The minor, mindless automatic little gestures are just where the trap is,” she said.

“Margaret felt the coldness around her heart which was the climate she had lived in since Lou died” is an example of synecdoche to describe love and loss.

This literary device is most notably utilized in the very title of one of the stories: “You Cannot Judge a Pumpkin’s Happiness by the Smile Upon Its Face”