analyze short story

    I read the short story, “Wallet” by Allen Woodman.  It is about a father who tries to prank a pick-pocketer by having a fake wallet filled with losing lottery tickets and fortunes in his back pocket.  In the end, the thief takes his wallet, but is seen by store clerks, so there is a little chase scene.  The father runs out of there so that he doesn’t have to confront the thief or the police.  I thought this story wasn’t really that interesting.  It’s sort of interesting how somebody is trying to prank a thief, but I didn’t really care.  The story did, however, start right off with the purpose of the story.  It started by saying how the character was fed up with all of the pickpocketing, then jumped right into how he was going to teach them a lesson.  This allows the reader to be directly sucked into the story, knowing what they are getting, right out of the gate.  From then on, the story stays on track with what the beginning had to offer the readers, so the potential to hold one’s attention was high.  I don’t really see what there was to learn from this story, other than how pickpocketing can get annoying.  Maybe it’s saying how people should stand up for themselves.  I feel like it was just a story to give the reader a good time by giving them something that they might find amusing.  

   
    There was some good word usage in this story, as well as some similes.  An example of good word usage is the word “subdued” because it is not one that is commonly heard.  It is used in the sentence, “the thief subdued, the clerk holds up the reclaimed item.”  The word means quiet and restrained, meaning that the thief willingly surrendered.  An example of a simile is when the author said, “he bends over farther than he has bent in years to retrieve them, allowing the false billfold to rise like a dark wish and be grappled by the passing shadow of a hand”.  That sentence gives another way to look at what is happening, so that it makes things easier to picture in your head.  Another example is when he says, “he is an old man trying to act feeble and childlike, and he overdoes it like stage makeup on a community-theater actor.”  This sentence also gives the reader a more in-depth way to look at what is happening.  This way, the reader might be able to connect it to something in his or her own life.