The Order of All Through the House

For the most part, I enjoyed the effect of the reverse chronological order structure of "All Through the House." The main focus of the piece is on the reasons why Wayne murdered his wife and family, and placing the events backwards in time allows us to first find out about this mystery - why Wayne did what he did - and as the events are revealed to us, we can trace back through what we already know and be able to say "oh, this caused that and that event led to this other thing." The meaning of each event is immediately clear and thus the effect is a little more profound than if the story had been in chronological order. If the story were in order, we would be forced to look back or try to recall earlier in the story to figure out the importance of what happened earlier in time. However, there was one negative (in my view) impact of flipping the order of events. The Freitag triangle structure seems to flip as well. Most of the action and suspense takes place in the first half. By the midway point on page 275, we have solved the mystery for ourselves and we know how everything plays out. The rest is kind of like being introduced to the rising action after the climax. It actually is a somewhat interesting effect, but the second half of the story still dragged a bit for me.

As for "Recitatif," I read through it assuming Twyla was black, I guess since Twyla sounded more like black person's name to me. Looking back on it though, there don't seem to be a whole lot of clues one way or the other. I think the Jimi Hendrix discussion makes a bit more sense if Twyla were black and Roberta were white, since rock and roll was much more popular with whites, but of course Jimi Hendrix was black, so we probably can't conclude much from it. The author probably intentionally used the fact that Jimi Hendrix was black but more popular among whites to make the races of Twyla and Roberta as unclear as possible