"[Two] Hunters in the Snow"

"'I'm going to the hospital,' Kenny said.  But he was wrong.  They had taken a different turn a long way back," (237).

This blog is in response to question number eight for "Hunters in the Snow."

Personally, I am quite the fan of irony, but this was just plain depressing. I mean, not only did Tub and Frank force Kenny to lie in the trunk bleeding to death while they drank coffee twice (thank you cold weather for slowing down blood slow so that Kenny had a slow death?), but they went on to trust their memories for about fifty miles worth of direction.

There were so many times when Wolff could have came out of his position to talk to us, but decided to save all of the gun power until the last two sentences.  Why?  When Kenny first brought up Frank's affair, the narrator could have given us the scoop or when Kenny shot the dog, the narrator could have told us something about the farmer's plea, but instead, Wolff waited until the end when it was unexpected.

The biggest irony in this for more came from the fact that it followed the phrase that Kenny had said multiple times throughout the story already.  Nothing would have given away the fact that something bad was to follow expect for the fact that there was only one line left in the story and nothing had came that would signal a conclusion until now.

By coming out of character and telling us something that the characters did not know, the reader is allowed to make a choice on the ending of the story.  This conclusion is based on which characters the reader related to throughout the story.  I related to Frank, so I feel like he had planned to get rid of his friend.  No one would take two breaks, take the directions into the bar, and then forget them on the counter and not even think to go back to get them.  Not only this, but they didn't take a "wrong" turn, but a "different" turn.  Now, the question says that the characters did not know that they were not going the correct way, so he is really probably mocking how clueless these characters were.

Was this story a farce?