Voice - Salinger's Once a Week Wont Kill You

Lupe Martinez

http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/killyou.html

In this short story Salinger uses a lot of insinuation and restraint. These techniques build the tone of the story slowly so that the context of each action is revealed as the character does more. Although one could say that’s true of all plots, I think that these techniques are particularly useful in this piece because Salinger is using the pacing of the story to show the mood of his main character.
He begins with the very simple action of packing; his main character is serious and brisk but not necessarily urgent. He is formal, almost business like with the woman in the room although eventually we learn that he is his wife. The reader sees a different side of the main character when he is with his aunt, there is a tenderness to the moment that was absent with his wife. What does this mean? I think it’s meant to show that the Young Man has more respect for his aunt than his wife She is more mature than his wife who has never stopped speaking to him in “italics”. Moreover, Salinger bluntly describes the aunt as having “an intelligent face” while his wife seems more childlike because she had been married (?) with him for “three years and she had never stopped talking to him in italics” that is, she never stopped putting emphasis in her speech. His wife also specifically puts emphasis on terms like “horrible” and “anything” that are reminiscent of the adolescent view of concepts in infinitives like “forever” and “always,” a sort of exaggerated sentiment.
Still, Salinger’s voice comes through most in his syntax. His sentences are generally short and are used to describe. When Salinger describes the young woman’s arms he says “They were brown and round and good” and when he describes the house Salinger says “a flight of wide, thickly carpeted steps.” His sentences contain small details that, I think, are meant to make the things he describes common place. This situation happened to everyone; many sons, and husbands, and nephews went away to war. Moreover that it also happened to anyone. In the details of the story he describes a young man who owns a house and has a hired cook, and can support his aunt, all of these things seem to imply a an upper class. The main character and his family are people of means. Salinger does not reveal the character’s names he lets them identify each other. The narrator only refers to the characters as “the young man” and “the young woman” and “the aunt” and “the nephew” so that each character is identified through some kind of quantifier. I think this is because Salinger is trying to imply that this situation affected these types of people and those who are relative to those people. I think this is furthered by the fact that the characters identify and name each other, we learn that the Young Woman is Virginia because her husband calls her name, the Young Man is Richard because his aunt identifies him and the Aunt is Rena because her nephew identifies her. They are important to each other, to the narrator and to reader they are just people living in war time.
I think Salinger’s use of insinuation is also part of his voice. The insinuation does two things for the story. The first is that it implies that war is understood, the characters see war as inevitability. This is shown mostly when Richard’s aunt says “I knew this would happen two years ago…” Not only in her statement but also in her use of emphasis, in that she speaks to him in italics, it’s something that the women share, knowledge of the inevitable. The second aspect of the insinuation is that this is how Salinger is communicating with the reader. Salinger mentions Sousa marches on the radio, George Washington the first American general, March 1944, and “the last one” all of which eventually lead the reader to the realization that Richard is going off to fight in World War 2.
Restraint comes with the insinuation but it does more for the tone than for the insinuation. The tone reflects the character’s feelings. He speaks in short sentences to his wife, small curt responses to his wife’s ramblings. On the other hand, he speaks tenderly with his aunt and tells her a story about his college days. This shows not only his feelings at the moment before he leaves for way but how he wants to leave each of the members of his family and consequently this builds the reader’s understanding of the character’s personality.