The Ethical Dilemmas of Life in The Rattler

In life, people are always confronted with ethical dilemmas. The same applies to the short story “The Rattler.” The narrator shows the snakes struggle as he attacks and kills him with a hoe. In “The Rattler”, the narrator illustrates how all living creatures, whether human or not, are valuable, and therefore should not be harmed, which is conveyed through juxtaposition, syntax, and personification.

In the beginning, the narrator immediately begins his story by using the juxtaposition to foreshadow his inner conflict between leaving the snake alone and killing it out of duty. The narrator doesn’t want to kill the snake when he first sees it; instead, he wrestles with whether or not to. His inner struggle is evident in the shades of light and dark that is represented in the story. For example, the setting was “after sunset” as “light was thinning.” In other words, it was twilight where it wasn’t completely dark, and it wasn’t completely light out. The atmosphere was somewhere in-between, which is utilized by the narrator to showcase the difficulty he experiences. This “in-between” state is shown when the narrator’s “first instinct was to let him go his way” but he after some reflection, he thought about the “children, dogs, horses at the ranch” and felt it was his “duty, plainly” to kill the snake. His mind was in conflict with his emotions, or instincts, which wanted the snake to just be free and not harmed. Instinctually, he wanted to protect life, but he only started to think about killing it out of duty. Thus, the juxtaposition involving light and darkness reflects the inner struggle he faces over killing the snake.

Once the inner conflict is established, the narrator integrates a variety of syntactical sentences to reflect the shifting mood. In the beginning, the mood is calm and tranquil, but this mood is disrupted when he sees the snake. The short sentence -- “Abruptly [he] stop[s] short” -- reflects the sudden notice of the snake and coming to a halt. The once tranquil mood now shifts to a more tense tone, as he notices the features of the creature right in front of him. Right after, the narrator introduces a long sentence with two independent clauses punctuated by a semi-colon in between to reflect his tense and uncertain feelings at the moment. He then showcases his realization that the creature is indeed a snake with a dash (“It was a rattlesnake -- and [he] knew it.”) The short sentence draws attention and emphasizes the danger that the snake imposes. Once he makes realizes it is indeed a rattlesnake, a series of short parallel sentences with semicolons after each sentence follows (“He held his ground in calm watchfulness; he was not even rattling yet, much less was he coiled; he was waiting for me to show my intentions.”) The series of short parallel sentences underscore the duel between the narrator and the snake. They are in a face-off with each other, and the snake is keenly watching the narrator’s every move. Specifically, when the narrator writes that “[the snake] held his ground in calm watchfulness” it connotes how the snake is commanding power and respect from the narrator because the snake values his own life, and he doesn’t want to kill the narrator unless he absolutely has to. Thus, the variety of syntactical sentences serve to shift the mood from one of serenity to danger to foreboding.

Ultimately, the narrator advances how all life is valuable through the use of personification. The narrator uses the pronoun “he” rather than “it” when he addresses the snake, which shows how the snake is humanized. The narrator values the snake’s life as he recognizes that they are both protecting something that is meaningful to them, which to the snake is his life, while, to the narrator, it is his family back at the ranch. Moreover, the snake becomes further personified when asserts that the rattlesnake was “quite sportingly warning me.” The adverb “sportingly” shows the sportsmanlike action of the rattlesnake because even though the narrator is trying to take his life, he still values the narrator’s life, revealing the snake’s humanity.

The narrator is reflecting on a moment in the past, which shows that he has processed the experience and looking back at it with some semblance of wisdom and detachment. He realizes that even though the narrator brutally kills the snake, he ultimately regrets his decision, which illustrates that all life is valuable and should not be harmed. The narrator’s killing of the snake is represented in a paradoxical way: he murders the snake, but at the same time, the rhetorical devices he uses -- juxtaposition, syntax, and personification -- illustrate the struggle and the gentleness in which he describes the snake. As the story nears the end, the narrator states, “Proving that a dead snake may still bite.” The snake is still biting when he is dead, but the narrator is also metaphorically bitten by this incident as he admires the snakes in a fair and majestic way.