Rhetorical Choices and Effects in Jean Stafford’s “The End of a Career”
Rhetorical Choices and Effects in Jean Stafford’s “The End of a Career”

Summary/Abstract: The present paper focuses on “The End of a Career,” the last short-story in Jean Stafford’s 1969 collection titled Collected Short-Stories, using the rhetorical approach to narrative as an investigative method. The result is an investigation of the purpose behind the artistic communicative act that is “The End of a Career,” starting from the range of rhetorical effects that accompany the progression of this narrative. As a rule, the narrator's choices of narrative technique and manner represent the way in which (s)he seeks to influence the audience’s cognition, emotions and values and reveal the purpose of the communicative act. Therefore, I will show that this realistic inverted-chronology reconstruction of Angelica Early’s life the narrator carries out is meant to bring to the short story the dignity of tragedy and reveal the protagonist as a twentieth-century tragic heroine.

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