The Silver Dish

 "What do you do about death-in this case, the death of an old father?" Sam Bellow immediately establishes the questions he will address through and throughout his short story, "The Silver Dish." These themes are namely, death and specifically, the death of an aging father. However, his precise thematic introduction debunks the readers' inherent expectations of a subtle narrative approach. Readers expect to decipher the narrative's central question after sorting through descriptions of settings, characters, and the gradual development of a conflict. Bellow disenchants these reader expectations by opening his narrative with a question posed directly to the readers. He establishes the story's central conflict  before introducing any of the traditional elements of narrative: character, setting, etc. 

"If you're a modern person," bellow continues,"sixty years of age, and a man who's been around like Woody Selbst, what do you do?" While he introduces the central character Woody, he still declines to offer any explanation of what he means by 'modern person' and what this detail indicates about Woody's character. The focus of the narrative still seems directed at the readers, the 'you' in his question. 

"Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. "

Now at last, Bellow has explained how the character Woody relates to the narratives central question, but he does so with the introduction of even more new ideas and questions for the reader to ponder:  'what is the condition of Woody's father?' 'Why does he emphasize the contemporary background?' 

"Think what times these are. The papers daily give it to you—the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That’s what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of the human community, like a global death-peristalsis."

Bellow now establishes the context of the narrative's central question, but he does so at the conclusion of the opening paragraph. His style is characterized by an inversion of the narrative structure. His opening paragraphs ends where the reader would expect it to begin, with the dramatic establishment of a setting. Bellow's first sentence epitomizes this inversion of the narrative structure. "What do you do about death-in this case, the death of an old father?" Bellow does not construct his narrative as a medium for the question 'what do you do about death?' Instead, the story comes as humanizing afterthought to the grandiose theme of death. Hypotaxis works ironically in this sentence by placing the question of 'what do you do about death,' before the structurally essential detail, 'the death of an old father.'