Sometimes, leading the reader to have an emotion response is essential in connecting characters in the story to audience. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis walks around the huge but hollow living room when she describes her boring daily life and stories to Walter, there are some “crossing and recrossing bars of shadow cast by a window blind.” (Blaser) The director of Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder skillfully uses the shadow of the window blind to imply that Phyllis is indeed living in a prison without freedom and she is trapped in her nominal marriage. If we take a look carefully at the decoration inside the house, it is not hard to realize that there isn’t a personal object or even a picture to reveal Phyllis’s status in this house. When Walter is pacing around in the living room while he is waiting for Phyllis, he “ …show more content…
The chapters of Double Indemnity become nonsensical and leave readers feeling the way Walter and Phyllis do in the story. The end of the novel has Phyllis “covering her face in chalk white with black circles under her eyes and with red on her lips and cheeks, rapped in a red silk scarf,” plans to end her life by jumping to her death into the ocean at night under a full moon. Walter, who is also on the ship, finally understands this is what happens when you have chosen the darkness to be your partner in crime and tells Phyllis he himself will join her as well. The ending of the novella is more phenomenal, bleak and nothing at all like the easy way out if offered by other endings. In Cain’s book, Phyllis is so much more than a young, cunning seductress and the cold-blooded black widow spider hanging in her web. She is pathological; but yet, she is more than just a little crazy. Leaving the reader somehow feeling sympathy for the characters like the bond between them and allows for an emotional connection to occur, which is James wants to do in this