Analysis. From: w.S.

The text was written by Leslie Poles Hartley. He is a famous English writer. L.P. Hartley was a highly skilled narrator and all his tales are admirably told.

“W.S.” comes from “The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley” and was published posthumously in 1973. The story told about a writer Walter Streeter. He was snowed under the postcards which came from anonymous. Initially, these postcards didn’t disturb the writer. He tore them away. But some days later, Walter Streeter cast his eyes over the initials of the anonymous and was shocked by such odd coincidence. The initials were his own. Walter appealed to his friend, then to the police. They advised him not to worry considering that W.S. could be a woman or even someone who never show up in the flesh.

The structure of the text is not homogeneous: the narration is interrupted by the elements of description. Inner thoughts and feelings of the main character are interwoven with the narration.

The story about Walter Streeter is a psychological tale. The main character is constantly struggle with himself during the story. He tried to find the explanation of the origin of these postcards. And when he couldn’t do it, he became actually a borderline case.

The author told about the splitting personalities. He described in details the stages of this condition. It makes the tension of the atmosphere gradually increasing and getting its top at the end of it.

Maybe this text is about that creative people are a little mad inside. Hartley described the Walter’s madness through his works. They are not homogeneous (there is the cleavage in his writing), one paragraph languorous with semicolons and subordinate clauses, and another sharp and incisive with main verbs and full stops.

Analyzing this text deeper, it can be found other pretext. Any writer should be responsible for his works. If he writes bad work, he should realise that this work can impact on other people and bring up their emotions wrongly.

As far as postcards are concerned whether Walter sent these postcards to himself we can say. Perhaps they were sent from his enemies to destroy his morally so that he couldn’t work. I suppose they were a source of supply for him and created a new reality. They changed his mind. At the end he put them behind the clock on the chimney piece. He couldn’t live without them, they were a part of him.

The end of the story is written like a detective one. The tension of the story reaches the apogee when Walter noticed the each next postcard was sent from a place geographically closer to him.

There are many interrogative sentences that show hesitation and anxiety of the character. There are a lot of stylistic devices, such as antonomasia - “Walter Streeter”; zeugma – “took up the time and energy”; metonymy - “faint strings of curiosity”; personification – “growing pains”; periphrasis – “conscious mind“, “little mouse-like creature”, “poisonpens”, many examples of inversion. The language of the writer is very rich and full of various kinds of stylistic devices and that makes his story more vivid and picturesque.