Impulse is a sudden strong and unreflective urge or desire to act. In both Jim Heynan’s short story“What Happened During the Ice Storm” and John Montague’s poem “The Fight”, the characters take on roles that portray the different ways people act on impulse which is that when you find something new the first actions that come to mind are to either revere or ruin something. The role and results of impulse are made clear by the use of graphic and emotive words in both texts’ descriptions of the actions of the authors’ characters. In “What Happened During the Ice Storm”, Heynan uses lucid-like words when it comes to the characters’ actions to give readers the feeling of being on edge and shocked. The story takes place on a winter day during a freezing rain; farmers went out ice-skating to hunt the helpless pheasants whose eyes had frozen shut because of the supercooled weather. Some boys left their warm and cozy homes to go looking for said birds too; however, when they did find the pheasants, the boys were expecting one of the ones among them to take action towards the birds impulsively but instead they all remained motionless as seen in, “...each expecting the other to do something. To pounce on a pheasant, or to yell Bang”.