Structure
The short story “Mule Killers” by Lydia Peelle is structured like a flashback in which a father tells his son about the year in which the son was conceived and the relationship between the father and his own father. Although the flashback belongs to the father, the story is told by his son – the narrator – who tries to understand the way in which the relationship between his father and grandfather developed.
The backstory has an exposition, a rising action, a climax, and a falling action, while the present-day story also offers a resolution.
Title
The expression “mule killers” refers to a number of things in the short story. On the one hand, the “mule killers” are the trucks which take the mules away from farms and bring them “to the slaughterhouses” (l. 3). On the other hand, the “mule killers” are the tractors that replace the mules because of agricultural modernization and the farmers’ need to keep their farms competitive: “In the spring of that year, in the afternoon of one rain-brightened day, my father’s father goes to Nashville and buys two...
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Beginning
The exposition of the story introduces the main characters – the narrator, his father, and his grandfather. Also, we discover that we are going to read a story that happened when the narrator’s father was 18:
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Middle
In the rising action, we are introduced to a backstory about the narrator’s father. When he was 18, the narrator’s father was in love with a girl named Eula Parker, but she did not return his feelings. To make her jealous, the young man dates one of the girl’s friends and, frustrated by Eula’s indifference, he even sleeps with her to make his pain disappear.
Several tension points follow. First, the young man discovers that the girl he made love to is pregnant; before that, the last mules from the farms are loaded into a truck and sent to the slaughterhouse:
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Ending
In the falling action, the narrator returns to the present-day events and states that his father knows why his grandfather was crying back then:...
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