Panganiban, Marife M.

BSED EN

THE CHIEFTEST MOURNER ANALYSIS

This short story “The Chieftest Mourner” is a narration by a girl in her college days. The title of
this story is unfamiliar to me and even the definition is a bit difficult to understand. But from the
word “mourner” I think it means suffer. This story has something to convey and while reading
this story, I felt as if I were the narrator who experienced a great catastrophe.
In here, I understand that the narrator here is obviously carrying the pain of the past which you
can witness upon narrating the particular situation. The other characters in this story doesn’t have
names except for Esa, Aunt Sophia and the narrator -Aida Rivera Ford. This made it hard to trace
of who is doing sometimes. The characters felt heavy feelings and mixed emotions here. In this
story it presented rage, feelings of emptiness, secrecy, hatred, courage, downcast and there is
seems a competition here. This story is very interesting to read because it is easily to understand
though there is a part of no names for everybody.
The story is something about tangled relationship. The narrator of the story (Aida Rivera Ford)
narrates her that her uncle and aunt was separated in ten years. In this story I encountered some
conversations which express the stance of the characters. I also listed some word here which
depict particular situation. Some words are “alacrity, brazenly, commiseration, and sober,”. The
word “brazenly” that used by the narrator described the stance of the narrators aunt named
Sophia who is always following his uncle everywhere and affirming herself his wife. That’s why
other people was confused which one of them are the real wife of the poet. The other one is
“sober” which described the poet. Other word is “alacrity” which described the situation when
the narrator begin to report all details of her aunt’s health. And the last one is the word
“commiseration” which is situated her that the narrator was received to for the death of the
husband of her aunt.
In this story, you will witness the conflict between the characters relationship. I observed here
that the perception of the people to towards to the mistress is very antagonistic which is
happening right now when someone committed to adultery expect the judgement and
persecutions. Adultery is obviously a sin and you cannot control anything that happens around us
even the judgement of others. You cannot even defense yourself whether your intention is good
or bad because you will be branded as a mistress after being committed with someone who
already married. That’s why we should be very careful on committing specially in a relationship.
Because it is a life time decision and once we commit, we can do nothing but to live with it. Life
is a choice and every choices has its different consequences and it should be good for a life time
or good for a short time.