"Under the Radar" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short Story/Fiction

The setting is inside and briefly outside a car somewhere in Connecticut at night on Quaker Bridge Road near the Shenipsit Reservoir. The context is the tension created by the sudden admission by Marjorie Reeves to her husband Steven of a recently ended affair with the male host of the party that is their destination.

The story is narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator capable of providing perspectives of both husband and wife at the center of the narrative.

The tone is straightforward and sincere, lacking any ironic distancing. The story commences with an admission of infidelity which creates a dark mood that becomes increasingly more menacing as the story progresses.

Complicated. The husband and wife inside the car both move back and forth throughout the story taking on the roles of both protagonist and antagonist.

The conflict driving the story is how marital relations already under heavy stress is impacted by the wife’s admission to having had an affair with the host of the party to which they are heading.

The story climaxes with one member of this husband-and-wife duo purposely choosing to drive their car into the other.

Early in the narrative, the narrator informs us of Steven’s thoughts about his wife that foreshadow revelations to come: “it would help his career to have a pretty, spirited wife no one could pigeonhole.”

The story’s opening line: “On the drive over to the Nicholsons’ for dinner—their first in some time—Marjorie Reeves told her husband, Steven Reeves, that she had had an affair with George Nicholson (their host) a year ago, but that it was all over with now and she hoped he—Steven—would not be mad about it and could go on with life.”

The actual precise details of how the story ends is only alluded to, thus creating a certain level of ambiguity as to the actual outcome.

The turning point in the story arrives with imagery detailing how a raccoon in the road briefly manages to avoid disaster only to make a mistake in judgment which results in an even worse situation for themself: “it must’ve decided that where it had been was much better than where it was going, and so turned to scamper back across Quaker Bridge Road toward the cool waters of the reservoir, which was what caused the car—actually it was a beat-up Ford pickup—to rumble over it.”

n/a

The story of the raccoon being run over by the pickup is later paralleled at the end when one of the spouses drives the car over the other spouse.

The title of the story is a direct reference to an example of metonymy. Richard’s first response to his wife admitting to an affair is to mutter a term he’d heard on TV: “ground clutter.” One definition of ground clutter is unwanted information by radar detection displaying on screen as something else.

The description of the raccoon as seeming to decide that the car containing the tense atmosphere of Steven and Marjorie was a worse destination than the one with the beams of light heading toward it is an example of personification.