A Finger for a Car

Roald Dahl´s story "Man From the South" starts in a vacation resort in Jamaica. The story begins with the narrator sitting beside the pool when he sees a man in a white suit approach him and he asks him if he can take a seat. After some conversation with the man, one of the American sailors and one of the girls get out of the pool and take a seat near them. The sailor offers the narrator and the man a light but the man from the south says that the lighter will not work with the wind. The man proposes a bet, the bet was that all of them were going to go back to his hotel room and if the sailor was able to light his lighter ten consecutive times without failing, he would win the man´s car, a Cadillac, but if he failed he would loose the little finger of his left hand. After some hesitation the sailor agreed to the bet, the narrator would be the referee. They went back to the man´s room and readied the materials, after tying the boy's hand to the table, they prepared to begin the bet. After successfully lighting the lighter eight times, a women barged into the room, stopped the bet and told them the man had nothing to bet because she had won it all and that it was her car. The narrator gave her the keys and noticed that she had only one finger and a thumb on her hand.

I really like how Dahl sets the mood of the story while also describing the setting.

 It was a fine garden with lawns and beds of azaleas and tall coconut palms, and the wind was blowing strongly through the tops of the palm trees making the leaves hiss and crackle as though they were on fire. I could see the clusters of big brown nuts handing down underneath the leaves. (1)

I think that by using this technique you get the reader to actually feel like him/her should feel while reading the story and creates a setting that matches the mood  and helps the reader visualize what a character is seeing or even feeling. By actually describing the setting, you can get the reader to feel the mood subconsciously. Setting the mood is an important part of foreshadowing given that the reader has already an image and a feeling attached to it in his/her head. The best way to elaborate this picture the reader is forming is by adding characters and that completes the picture.

"Some small ting you can afford to give away, and if you did happen to lose it you would not feel too bad. Right?"

"Such as what?"

"Such as, perhaps, de little finger of your left hand." (4)

The characters of the story complete the picture the author was trying to create and therefore if it was a "creepy" mood, then at least one character in the story must fall in the same category. Some people might even overlook the quote above, but I believe that this quote is one of the most important characterization quotes in the story. The quote above transform an almost uninteresting character to a character that completely changes the story and adds an excitement component to it. If there was only the setting, the story would not be able to be fully appreciated but a character adds human qualities to the full picture. 

I thought "The Man From the South" was an interesting story that builded up even to the very last sentence of the story. I think that Dahl did an excellent job at choosing the exact time a piece of evidence would be introduced. The evidence was sufficient enough to allow the reader to make a satisfying inference about the ending of the story. Every piece of evidence was placed so that it foreshadowed a part of the story without being too obvious. The imagery and characterization successfully allowed the reader to picture the story in his/her head. The escalating plot of the story made this story an exciting and interesting read.