The Cricket War analysis

This is a story by Bob Thurber, an American writer.
The text under analysis is a short story, a true-life boy’s story. The general atmosphere of the text is ironical and moralizing.
The title of the text is “The Cricket War” judging by it we can guess that the matter is about insects and the fight against them.
The story describes the events happening in one family. They met with the invasion of crickets and started an unequal battle with them. The more people tried to banish the crickets, the more insects they found in their house. Finally, the father decided to burn the junk from the cellar, thinking that crickets live exactly there. And that led to a tragic outcome of the story. The wind lifted some embers onto the wood pile where gasoline was in the lawn mowers fuel tank. The explosion occurred and the whole house, with den insects, burned down completely.
In my opinion, the moral of this story is that sometimes something does not happen the way we want and that we need to appreciate what we have.
Compositionally the text falls into some logical parts: exposition, narration of events and the ending. The climax lies in the in the moment, when father told that all ‘was the end’, but his son thought that he should have said ‘This is beginning’. The ending is as all family lost their home in a fire, and crickets continued to chirr loudly.
The author employs a lot of expressive means and stylistic devices such as epithets: ‘noisy cockroach’, ‘dumb horny bug’ ; repetition ‘This is the beginning, The beginning of our war, the beginning of our destruction.’.
On the whole the text is rich in stylistic devices; they are used to reveal the character’s inner world and feelings as well as the author’s treatment of the situation in general or his irony to the characters.