Character Analysis of The Invalids Story Essay

The Invalids Story- Character Analysis

The narrator of the story, called Cap'n by Thompson the expressman, is one of two victims of a case of mistaken identities, which involves a coffin containing his dead friend, John B. Hackett, and a box of guns with Limburger cheese on top. The narrator is only forty-one years old but he says that he has aged prematurely as the result of his misadventures two years ago. In the first line of the story , he states that he seems to be a sixty year old man that is married and goes on to tell his story.

Motivated by Hackett's last wishes, the narrator attempts to transport Hackett's body from Cleveland, Ohio to the fictional town of Bethlehem, Wisconsin. At the train station the narrator labels the box of guns, thinking it is his friend's coffin, and loads the box of guns on his train. He notices a stranger placing a package on top of the "coffin," but thinks nothing of it at the time.

The package contains some ripe Limburger cheese, which both the narrator and the train's expressman, Thompson, mistake for the smell of Hackett's corpse. The narrator notices the smell first, although Thompson is the first one to take action by breaking one of the express car's window panes to get fresh air. Although Hackett has only been dead for one day, the narrator lies and says he has been dead for two or three, in an attempt to explain the smells.

The narrator and Thompson attempt to move the box of guns, but it is too heavy. Through a series of misguided attempts by Thompson to mask the smell with various chemicals and other items, the smell gets so bad that the narrator and Thompson decide to spend the rest of the trip outside the train on the express car's platform. As a result, the narrator becomes sick with typhoid fever, which proves fatal two years later when he is telling the tale. A similar fate is assumed for Thompson, although it is never discussed.

Throughout the story, the narrator gives his audience information that he did not possess during his adventures on the train, such as the fact that the coffin is actually a box of guns and the package on top of the gun box contains the smelly cheese.