Marvin Marquez
September 11, 2015
English 110 – Christensen
Strout/New Criticism Essay
New Criticism: Incoming Tide
“Incoming Tide” is a short story from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which
discusses the sensitive subject of suicide. The story is about Kevin Coulson visiting his
old town of Crosby, Maine and is contemplating suicide. By sheer coincidence he sees
his old math teacher Olive Kitteridge, who later on discusses mental illnesses, past
relationships, depression, and suicides within their families, notable suicides being
Kevin’s mother and Olive’s father. Olive mentions Patty Howe who works at the marina
diner nearby and how her constant miscarriages are contributing to her miserable state
of mind, which leads to the recurring theme of this chapter being depression. Kevin’s
depression gives him a tunnel vision like view in which there is only one direction to go,
which would be death. However, with Olives surprise visit to his car, and the saving of
Patty’s attempted suicide, Kevin reconsiders his fateful option and with that his tunnel
vision widened, giving him peripheral vision again. Strout shows the readers how ironic
it was for Kevin, a person who was on the verge to killing himself, to save another life,
which in turn saved his own life by reconsidering his choice of suicide.
When reading a section of text such as poems short stories or novels, there can
be multiple ways to interpret the meaning behind the work. One would create their own
interpretation, or another would look into the history or personality of the author. New
Criticism ignores both of these methods and focuses on the text itself to determine if
the author controlled their writing well enough so that their work stands on its own. To
decide this, new critics use a technique called close reading to carefully examine the text
to see if it contains elements such as oppositions, tensions, ironies, or paradoxes and
determine if these elements resolve into a unified whole. To put it simply, the new critic
looks at both the text and the way it’s written, identifies the complexities within, and
find an idea that unites these complexities which resolves and creates a unified whole.
There are several literary devices used to analyze an author’s work such as tone, point
