Cet article examine les non-dits et leur effet sur le lecteur. His southern Appalachian material, caught between tradition and modernity, easily lends itself to reminiscences of the backward rusticity of past life which offers but a poor consolation for the no-way out misery of present conditions. Solitude, frustration and a sense of loss prevail in the derelict areas in which his stories are set and whose inhabitants, over time, have been left psychologically and socially shattered by the wars in which they have taken part, inland and abroad.
Suggestiveness is at its best in those fictions characterized by elliptical narratives, gaps and lapses of meaning, and plots jumping to unexpected turns, ironical twists and paradoxical endings. Withholding information is not just a dramatic device for creating suspense. Allowing for a suspension of the diegetic time, it generates a different reading and triggers a switch of attention from the logical articulation of events to mesmerizing images, unfamiliar landscapes, and obsessive details.
This reading experience is like a memorizing process. It brings forth a network of intra-textual and inter-textual echoes, running through and beyond the texts, restoring a form of literary continuity which makes up for the narrative and historical disconnections.
It ultimately provides the collection with an underlying structure, an aesthetic ordering of the pieces into a dynamic mosaic arrangement. The present study purposes to question the narrative gaps. It will show how they inform the reading process, at verbal and visual levels, by appealing simultaneously to affect, cognition and emotion, so as to make sense of and react to the unsaid, the evanescent, and the resurgent. It is the story of a failed escape and betrayal, staging a chain-gang prisoner, Sinkler, and a young farm girl, Lucy, whom he easily seduces and who promises to help him.
Taken in by his longing for freedom, he—ironically the one to be trusted—trusts the girl and remains blind to the many signs that hide her duplicity. The angel she appears to be eventually turns into a devil. There is no doubt that a fast reader will be left puzzled by the enigmatic ending, spontaneously wondering what happens to Sinkler and to the girl, or if Sinkler is going to be shot or just robbed, and by whom. Being the one who knew the directions, Lucy has taken him in circles while calling her husband to shoot him.
