Women Exposed In Katherine Bush's The Birthday Party

Female author Katherine Bush composes a short story “The Birthday Party”, exposing the vices behind a generation of women who were emphatically conformed to the velocity of men’s chauvinistic lifestyle. The text does not go far enough to explain it; however her descriptions, perspective, diction and syntax portray the husband’s insolence so well that its purpose to induce the reader’s disgust is utterly achieved. Initiating the short story by introducing her subjects immediately the author describes the pair of no extraordinary value but merely as a married “couple in their late thirties.” She begins by describing the simplicity within their physical characteristics, later informing the audience the couple was celebrating the husband’s
Primarily, the author introduces the pronoun to‘you.’ In this way, the reader is brought even more intimate with the situation at hand; the author realizes that almost every reader would think “Oh, now, don’t be like that!” persuading the reader to keep reading to see what happens next. The next sentence is very important because it portrays a series of events all happening very quickly; and to portray this, the author deliberately uses a run on sentence. She writes, “But he was like that, and as soon as the little cake had been deposited on the table, and the orchestra [finished] . . . and the general attention had shifted. . “ to keep the reader entertained and hoping to see how the husband reacts. Just as the answer is about to be revealed, the author now does something she hasn’t done yet, and this is introducing “I.” The author now introduces “I” because this, again, brings the reader closer to the incident; by doing this, the reader is not only reading about it, but he is reading a personal account of it. She writes that she, “couldn’t bear to look at the woman,” after the husband cruelly said something to his wife because she accidentally embarrassed him, and this puts the reader in the author’s