“The Gray Man” was a short story written by Sarah Orne Jewett who was a famous colorist that lived in New England and wrote short stories on local color. The story deals with the theme of death and with the character of Death himself.
Sarah Orne Jewett became famous for using beautiful and descriptive language to describe her setting in the story. She was even known for her use of personification on her work where she gives life inanimate objects and abstract notions to make everything in the story seem to drip with richness and reality. The story starts with a negative foreboding tone enhanced by the adjectives selected – “ungathered”, “unassailed” and “untended”. She personified the setting of summer evenings as “drawing their brown curtain of dusk”. In the setting of the story, the derelict farm, once owned by a seafaring man, holds many mysteries, which added to the supernatural tone of the story. There was “a suspicion of buried treasure and of a dark history.” There were even rumors abound that “some uncanny existence possessed the lonely place” until the main character of the story, the Gray Man, moved into that haunted place. Sarah Orne Jewett described grayish look to gray man’s skin and clothes, as well as, his air of serenity, goodness, and grace, even though he never smiled. The Gray Man’s unemotional demeanor upsets his counterparts. He is described as “chilling”, “Like a skeleton,” and “surrounded by strange foreboding,” and even told that the gray man “never smiled.” In accordance to the author’s story, the Gray Man isn’t a man at all but rather an allegory representing death. He appears suddenly, without warning, and none of the townsmen know his past. Yet each of his actions were designed
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The allegorical theme of this story is that life has meaning because it eventually