Great Falls Pragmatism

With so few words, short stories must achieve the same level of investment and emotion as novels with a thousand words or more available to them. This often requires passionate conflicts and quick resolutions, aspects which are strangely absent from Richard Ford’s Great Falls. The text is driven by unadulterated pragmatism. Every action a character makes - every sentence, every word - embodies the ideals of the modern tragedy that it realism. A narrative that follows ordinary people dealing with average issues, and yet their stories manage to be just as poignant as those of the ancient heroes from an epic. Every scene from Jack’s reaction to his wife’s lover, his decision to not fire his gun, and Jackie’s reaction to the entire ordeal is unapologetically
A fourteen year old boy whose closest connection in the middle of the Montana farm lands is his father who takes him bars. His father may have an idea of what his wife had been doing but Jackie was dragged into the middle of a conflict he didn’t even know was developing. So how is a fourteen year old boy meant to react after watching his father nearly shoot a man and having his mother walk away from the family? He comforts his father saying, “It’ll be all right” (544). It won’t really be alright but it’s also not the end of the world. Jackie knows “things seldom end in one event” and acts in a very placating manner when he goes to visit his mother (544). When his mother says she didn’t sleep and asks if he did he responds that he didn’t, even “though [he] had slept all night” because he knows empathy will make the situation easier (545). He didn’t try to make up excuses or yell at his mother or beg for an explanation because “[he] knew there was nothing [he] could say to change the way her life would be from then on. And [he] kept quiet” (546). And what other thoughts could occupy his mind on the walk back to the school but the “thought [he] could take the bus home if [he] got there by three” (546). Jackie may dealing with more conflict than a fourteen year old should. He recognizes that “[his] life had turned suddenly, and that [he] might not know exactly how or which way for possibly a long time. Maybe, in fact, [he] might never
Wake up, get ready for the day, go to work, come home, rinse and repeat. Occasionally these automatic decisions are interrupted and mutated by the passions of conflict and resolution but the desire to remain practical is always there under the surface to keep people sane. The actions of the inhabitants of Great Falls, Montana are acceptably sensible. And yet, there’s always the possibility that there were more emotions in the moment than we’re lead on to believe. This narrative is a third person flashback of a limited narrator. We’re restricted to Jackie’s thoughts and experience. Is this story truly realism or could the emotionless characters be a result of Jackie’s memories dulling over time. Perhaps he was emotionally stunted from the trauma or maybe the narrator just sees things through dull eyes in general. Practicality doesn’t often make for a very compelling story but anything else would have just been