The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.
This opening line is an excellent example of the techniques which have been ascribed to the Modernist movement literature. An important piece of information is purposely left out of this introductory sentence which would have been all but unthinkable in a short story just a few decades earlier. “The week after” what? The reader will eventually discover the “what” but not in the traditional way. The story is structured in twelve parts and the declarative one might expect to find as the opening line will not finally show up until part XII.
It glared at them a moment and then . . . went out.
The “it” in question is the Colonel’s eye. At the moment of death he opens just one and the narrator suggests that it would have changed only everything had he opened both to look at his daughters in that final moment of mortal connection. But no, he just opens one and with that he merely glares. One theme of the story is that of the dismissive psychology of patriarchy and how the Colonel’s full-throttled expectation of obeisance to this “fact” of life ultimately destroyed his family. This is the singular moment exemplifying the aspects of that theme.
"Do you know what day it is? It's Saturday. It's a week to-day, a whole week."
The entire story is circular. As previously indicated, the story opens upon a note of ambiguity. Something happened a week ago. By this point in the narrative it has been established what happened, but Constantia’s suddenly realization makes it seem as though it is something that happened far in the past. A dreamlike aura pervades the story as it works its circuitous way from the beginning to the end which is actually the beginning. But by this time, the reader has all the information that was missing at first…the weird thing is that it seems not to make much difference.
“I can't say what I was going to say, Jug, because I've forgotten what it was...that I was going to say."
"I've forgotten too."
Those who like for their stories to have a definitely demarcated line between the opening and the end in which the end explains about the middle are bound for disappointment. Modernist writers love to end their stories without having reached anything even remotely close to an Aristotelian sense of catharsis. This story does not lead to a plainly stated and starkly delineated lesson to take from it. In fact, even as notable as writer as Thomas Hardy completely missed the point of the story—according to its author—when he suggested that Mansfield should consider writing about Constantia and Josephine again. Her reply to another about this suggestion was that Hardy had failed to realize there was nothing more to say about them.
