Language

“Mule Killers” by Lydia Peelle is written in American English and the language employed by the author is easy to understand. As you have seen, dialogue is employed in the short story only once – even then, it is fragmented and only meant to suggest the grandfather’s opinions on life and the son’s stubbornness and naivety.

As the events in the short story take place on a farm, the author employs several words that suggest this environment: “trucks” (l. 2), “International Harvester tractors” (l. 5), “hayloft” (l. 54), “mule barn” (l. 55), “springhouse” (l. 55), “loading ramp” (l. 61), etc.

There are several important linguistic and stylistic devices employed by Lydia Peelle in “Mule Killers”, some of which we outline below.

Similes

Similes are employed to compare characters, events, or descriptions to other things; these might be things that are more familiar to the reader, or they might be used implicitly to give more information about something. For instance, Eula Parker “has hair thick and dark as soil” (l. 13), while the narrator’s father’s voice “is like a round stone that drops right there on the sidewalk” (l. 27). When the narrator’s father asks her out, Eula’s face ...