Lather And Nothing Else By Hernando Tellez Summary

The government official walks into the rebel’s barber shop on a hot sunny day in the short story “Lather and nothing else”, by Hernando Tellez. The author makes the story exciting by creating a lot of suspense. The author of the story create suspense in order to draw the readers into the story and make them want to read on to teach them that war is bad and killing someone is extremely hard to do. He creates suspense by using motifs and by telling us the character's thoughts.

In the story, the author attempts to draw the reader in by using multiple motifs to make the story more suspenseful. The main character in the story is the barber, who is also the rebel. One motif that the author uses is that he constantly brings up the razor, which

The story starts off with, “He came in without a word. I was sharpening my best razor on the leather strop”. The author clearly shows that there is something is wrong by using precise detail by saying it's his best razor, and the author also shows the razor makes the razor become an important part in the story. The razor is continually brought up throughout the story to build up suspense because it would be his murder weapon. Another example of the author using motif is the author bringing up sweating so much. The first words spoken by a character is, “its hot as a devil in here” spoken by Captain Torres. Throughout the story, the barber is sweating and shaking the entire time, from the nerves however. In the story, we later learn that the captain knows that he might kill him the entire time. Although the setting of the story is a hot summer day, the reason that he may have been sweating was because of the nerves. At the end of the story, the captain says to the barber, “They told me you would kill me. I came to find out if it was true.” and then says “but its not easy to kill. I know what i’m talking about”. The captain is clearly suicidal, he thought he was going to

Throughout almost the entire story, the main character thinks of every scenario that will happen if he chooses to kill the man or not to kill the man. The character says if he kills the man it would be hard to clean up and everyone will know it will be him, which will prompt the government to know after him and his life will be ended short. He also wants to be true to his job, a barber, and not be labeled as a murderer, because that will haunt him for the rest of his life. The upside however if he kills the man is that he will kill the person that has been murdering all of his people, and one of the main people of the government that is going against his side. So it's revenge for him. In stories, murder is a powerful technique to build suspense, and this story is all about whether he should or should not murder someone, which builds huge suspense. However if he decides not to kill the captain, then nothing happens, besides the fact that he let go a person that killed a lot of his people. In the end, however, he decides to not kill Captain Torres. The barber realizes that killing someone will haunt him for the rest of his life because it is morally wrong. He also realizes that killing someone is how war gets started and more intense, and he knows that war is bad, and nothing good comes out of it, so he decides not to kill the