1. Reader Reaction: Genius! Genius. Of course that’s not the whole of stories, but it does often end up that way. Even if stories can find enough creativity to deviate from this pattern, life doesn’t seem to like to. Life is a season of unhappiness-es and happiness-es. Ms Atwood’s writing style is simple, succinct, and biting.

2. Plot: All stories are the same, regardless of what authors write. Oh, they switch up their little chunks of story, but, truly, there are only two possibilities: a fulfilling, happy ending and a horrible one. Life itself, however, seems to only play out in the horrible. What, then, is the point of writing?

3. Character: Primary: John – nice man or narcissistic player or old married man; Mary – nice wife or used woman or twenty-two; Madge – the second option or the preference; Fred – good, valiant husband or good, cardiovascularly impaired husband.

4. Setting: A house, an apartment, a beach-house, a house, or a revolutionary war. The setting is life.

5. Point of View: Third-person Omniscient Objective (from the point of view of Sorrow).

6. Objects/Events: ‘stimulating and challenging,’ ‘they die,’ ‘hair falling out,’ motorcycle, ‘John and Mary die.’

* In the bedroom, socks, shorts, pants, shirt, tie, and shoes are specifically listed and reversed to signify the pattern in which clothes were removed and replaced. Then Mary is said to have undressed herself. She is more worthless than his clothes.
* Many descriptive lists are included: ‘rat, a pig, a dog,’ ‘fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.’
* All the characters are thinly veiled incarnations of humanity, and its predictable stories. A good indication of this are their simple names.
7. Mood: The mood is frustrated and hurt.
8. Ideas: Pax Canadiense, the inevitability of death, the Seasons of Storytelling, Pessimism, Sarcasm.
9. Style: The sentences are long and typically compound. The style is running – each thought runs into the other without transition. The words are simple punctuated with more complex words about every paragraph or so.
10. Worldview: Nihilism: There is a distinct trait of despair in death and the emptiness behind. Materialism: nothing beyond the physical life.