“The Painted Door” takes place during settler times on the prairies in North America. The beginning of the story is written as an omniscient narrative; the narrator has knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of both John and Ann. As the story progresses the point of view changes slightly and becomes limited omniscient/third person. The story is told as if the narrator can tell what Ann is thinking, feeling and saying, but not what Steven and John are feeling or thinking, except for what is perceived by Ann’s interpretations of their actions. The suspense of the story builds gradually through the duration of the rising action. John gets ready to brave the oncoming storm to go to his father’s house; Ann does not want him to go and leave her alone all day. Against Ann’s protests he leaves anyway, but not before telling her that he will stop by their neighbour Steve’s house and ask if he will come over to help Ann with chores and keep her company. Throughout the day Ann fights off loneliness and despair and tries to distract herself from dwelling on negative aspects of her life. After Ann has a terrifying experience with the snowstorm Steve arrives.

“Earlier in the evening, with the lamp lit and the fire crackling, the house had seemed a stand against the wilderness, against its frozen blizzard-breathed implacability, a refuge of feeble walls wherein persisted the elements of human meaning and survival. Now, in the cold creaking darkness, it was strangely extinct, looted by the storm and abandoned again.”

Ann tries to distract her mind by painting the door, this symbolizes the desperation that she suffers from because she feels an urgent need to fill the sense of emptiness, regret and loneliness that appears to be overtaking her life. The white paint on her dead husband’s hand could represent the feeling of hopelessness, regret and hurt that he must have felt after seeing Ann and John in bed together. The physical separation from John is symbolic of the isolation that Ann feels in her life. She feels as if she gets no company from John because he works all day, even when he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t talk to her very often because at the end of the day he is so tired from working that all he can do is eat and go to sleep. “That by his sacrifice he succeeded only in the extinction of his personality never occurred to him.” “…the only real difference that it all made was to deprive her of his companionship, to make him a little duller, older, uglier than he might otherwise have been.”

A multitude of emotions go through Ann’s mind, but she eventually gives in to Steve’s appeal. The climax of the story is reached when Ann sees the shadow of her husband looking down on the bed at her and Steven. At this point in the story I thought that John would try to hurt someone. The suspense continues during the falling action. Ann convinces herself that seeing her husband was just a dream. She regrets what she had done and she realizes that she loves her husband the way he is. The next day John’s dead body is found surprisingly close to his house. The denouement is attained when Ann sits alone with John’s body and she discovers that there is a smear of white paint on his hand. Ann is realistic character; she is multidimensional and recognizable as having complex relationships and motivations (Inside Stories). Ann spent a lot of time alone, and she seemed to dwel

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