Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Katherine Anne Porter

4 ideas

1. Miranda survives influenza, Adam dies

   In 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider,' Miranda, a young theater critic at a Denver newspaper in 1918, falls in love with Adam, a soldier on leave, and then catches the pandemic influenza; Adam nurses her before she is hospitalized. She passes through a delirium that brings her close to death, then recovers to Armistice celebrations and learns from a letter that Adam caught the flu from her and died in an army camp. The novella was drawn from Porter's own near-fatal case of the 1918 flu in Denver.

2. Recovery as exile from the dead

   The survivor of a near-death experience may treat the return to life as a loss rather than a rescue, because she has glimpsed a radiant peace and comes back to a world emptied of the person she loved. In the novella, Miranda's recovery coincides with the Armistice bells and cheering, and the public joy reads as grotesque to her. Survival leaves her in a grey, bleached world where she must go on living while numb.

3. Family legend replaces truth with romance

   In 'Old Mortality,' the Rhea family has turned the dead Aunt Amy into a romantic legend of a beauty who was fatally adored, and young Miranda grows up inside that myth. The adults she later meets tell her a different, meaner version of the same people and events. She rejects both inherited accounts and resolves to find out the truth about her own life, even though the story suggests this knowledge will stay partial and self-flattering.

4. Mr. Thompson kills Hatch, then himself

   In 'Noon Wine,' Mr. Thompson is a proud, idle Texas farmer whose farm prospers for nine years under a silent Swedish hired man, Olaf Helton. When a bounty hunter named Hatch arrives to take Helton back as an escaped asylum inmate, Thompson kills Hatch with an axe, believing he saw Hatch attack Helton. He is acquitted in court but cannot convince his neighbors, his family, or himself that he acted rightly, and he shoots himself after writing a note insisting on his innocence.

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