low down suddenly

‘ when the cars unexpectedly slow down suddenly

for the first time, the boys “grab the swinging guard chains,” nearly falling

Point of View 13

down. Paley’s description of the second slowdown, after the man pulls the emergency cord, is more shocking, relying on strong active verbs such as aban­ doned, caught, held, fell, whipped, pitched, crushed, and killed:

Almost at once, with a terrible hiss, the pressure of air abandoned the brakes and the wheels were caught and held.

People standing in the most secure places fell forward, then back­ ward. Samuel had let go of his hold on the chain so he could pound Tom as well as Alfred. All the passengers in the cars whipped back and forth, but he pitched only forward and fell head first to be crushed and killed between the cars.

When the writer locates the narrative in a physical setting, the reader is moved step by step toward acceptance of the fiction. The external reality of the setting is always an illusion, our mental images stimulated by the words that the writer has put on paper. Yet this invented setting is essential if we are to share the internal emotional life of the characters involved in the plot. A sense of place engages us in the fictional characters’ situations.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown” (p. 198), for example, when the protagonist Goodman Brown enters the dark, tangled world of the forest surrounding the colonial village of Salem to keep his appointment with the devil, the attentive reader may perceive that Brown really enters the troubled world of his own mind. Exercising his own free will, he voluntarily exchanges the companionship of his pretty young wife and her pink ribbons for the attractions of Satan.