Analysis of "Out, Out-"

Thesis: The allusion to Macbeth in the title of Robert Frost's "'Out, out-'" is a fitting comparison for the theme of the poem of the fickleness of life represented in Frost's use of dashes, exclamations and an anticlimactic conclusion.

• The dashes in the poem have multiple means by which they illustrate the fickleness of life.
• The quotation "Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it" (31) shows several of these purposes.
• Firstly, the dashes sound like gasping, and in the poem, the boy is dying - thus, gasping is an appropriate phonetic choice.
• Secondly, the dashes show emotion, the grief and anxiety which would surely be present in such an event as an amputation.
• Thirdly, the visual shape of the dash, a long line, is indicative of a long, slow event that consumes time as the dash consumes space, which could be illustrative of a long, slow last breath - thus, even visually, the dashes illustrate the end of the boy's life.
• Finally, although this was certainly not the original intent of the author given the time in which the author lived, the dashes lead to sounds that are similar to that of a modern-day heart monitor, where words are beeping: the short words would be heartbeat beeps, and the flow of words at the end could be the long beep after the patient's death; although this was not Frost's intention, the poem takes on additional meaning today.
• The exclamation points serve a similar intent, but to a lesser extent.
• After the boy loses his hand, the narrator makes the exclamatory interjection, "But the hand!" (17).
• This shows the emotion in the poem, as it is expressed not only by the characters, but by the narrator through exclamation.
• The exclamation points also add to the phonetic gasping, as, in the way Frost uses them, they cut short a sentence in a crescendo up to that point.
•  Finally, the poem concludes anticlimactically, relating the quickness of death to the fickleness of life indicated in the title.
• The conclusion of the poem is that the death's observers "turned to their affairs" (33); in other words, they moved on.
• This illustrates the fickleness of humans, and therefore how not only is death unexpected, but life changes quickly as well.
• Thus, the image presented in the titular allusion to Macbeth of a candle flickering is an accurate one: a candle dies easily with the smallest of winds, and when it does so, one simply obtains another candle.