On a Winter’s Night, by Kate DiCamillo
Read it here in less than 10 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
I love metafiction, so the opening sentence – ‘My father told me this story.’ – immediately entices me; it makes me think, ‘Yes! Tell me the story! I want to hear it!’. This first sentence is written in the first-person, then in the third sentence we switch the third-person (‘A boy was walking alone’), as our narrator reports to us the story that their father told them. This draws the reader in, as though we really are sitting there with the father and hearing him tell has tale to us. It also allows us to hear the father’s tale without comment or emotion from the narrator.
I love the fact that the story contains a reference to another story – a poster the boy saw, advertising a book titled ‘On a Winter’s Night’ (the same title as our story) in the school library. The poster makes the boy feel ‘dizzy’ because it utilises the Droste effect – an image repeating an image of itself, repeating an image of itself… for eternity. This story creates a similar effect through its structure, because we see the Droste effect in its ending, where the boy is welcomed into Martin Miner’s house to sit in front of the fire – this is a replication of the events in the poster in the library. There’s also replication in the tower of ham cans, all showing the same picture of a happy family; and in the reoccurrence of deer in the story – the same deer his father tries to kill in the forest appears outside the supermarket door, years later (and the boy feels ‘dizzy’, again, when he sees it).
As I was reading, one thing that struck me was the level of detail that appears in the father’s story, e.g. in the descriptions of the boy’s actions (‘The boy … stood in front of the store’s automatic doors until they opened and admitted him.’); his mention of materials (‘Styrofoam’, ‘velvet’, ‘cardboard’) and the colours he sees (‘white tiles alternating with red tiles’, ‘green shutters and a green door’, ‘yellow light’). Yet, the boy had previously said to the librarian, ‘“Who needs details?”’. So, how can this be the same boy? How can an angry child, who hates details, be the same person who tells such a detail-laden tale? At the end of the story, we’re pulled back out of the tale, as we switch to the first-person narrator, and the narrator asks his father the question: ‘“Were you the boy?”’ And that’s the point of this beautiful little story, isn’t it? No; the angry boy who hated details is NOT the same person as the father who tells this story, because the father has changed – he has avoided replicating his own father’s unhappiness, by seeking forgiveness from the deer, and by healing his own wounds, although the scars remain, and the bullet, too, lodged deep inside.
Mina Ma 