Importance of Control in Staffords Traveling Through the Dark Essay

Importance of Control in Stafford's Traveling Through the Dark In William Stafford's "Traveling Through the Dark," the narrator encounters a dead deer on the edge of the road. He knows that the safe and proper course of action is to push the deer into the canyon, but when he finds that the doe was near giving birth before she died, he hesitates to kill the unborn fawn. Stafford's central idea in the poem revolves around the decision the narrator makes to sacrifice the deer in order to clear the road of obstacles, so that others who drive on the dark, narrow road won't have to swerve. The image of the deer evokes sympathy and compassion from the reader because the image isn't merely that of a dead animal. The second stanza describes the dead deer as the reader would expect. The narrator "stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; / she had stiffened already, almost cold." The lifeless deer, merely a heap of animal recently killed on the road, seems ready to be pushed into the canyon, but the next stanza reverses the image of the deer. The narrator approaches ...