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Rhinoceros Beetle Short Story

Decent Essays

Rhinoceros Beetle by Susan Hawthorne is a story about a young man with an obsession with animals and a penchant for treating women the same way. Rhinoceros Beetle undergoes a major tonal shift as the story goes from a whimsical tale of a destructive young boy, to a chilling story of a threatening and reserved man from a small town. As the story goes on, the foreshadowing becomes more obvious as you realize how suggestive and cacophonous the words are, which further develop the ominous tone. The way the author understates the boy’s actions in the beginning of the story take the reader down a path of realization as the implications of what he’d done later in his life becomes more apparent.The insipid yet obscure way that the short story is written ultimately leaves the audience in the dark with a few pieces of information that allows them to make an astute assumption of what happened to the women that were in the man’s home. Also, parallelism is used frequently throughout the story to portray the boy’s odd actions as being on the same level of his more mundane activities. All of these components successfully develop the ominous tone of the story, leaving the readers feeling that something awful or unpleasant was happening both in the boy’s past and in his now adult life. Hawthorne’s word choice in Rhinoceros Beetle is deliberate and conscious as it is being used to create the sense of foreboding and apprehension for the audience. In the beginning of the story, words like

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