Literary Analysis of The Ox-Bow Incident.
The historical information and theme affect the literary sense of The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. The theme of a story is very important to the essential turning out of a book. There needs to be a good theme to a story in order for the story to be good. Usually when analyzing a story, you think of what the theme is based on what the story is about. I think that when writing a book it's the other way around, you know what your theme is first and then you think up a story to write based on what your theme or intention is. Also, the history behind a story also affects the quality of a story. A person has to consider the time or era that a book is written in when criticizing it. When considering this they also have to compare the book to others of its time. That is what made this book such a success. It was written in and original style and was unlike any other of it's time. Also, the quality also depends on the background of the author, and in this case, the author grew up in the area where western setting were very common and a very normal part of life.
The general plot starts when two men, who are the main characters of the book, arrive to a town that they have visited before. Upon arriving to the town they learn that there have been problems of cattle rustling and later in the book learn that a man of the town has been murdered. Automatically the people of the town assume that it was the same men doing the cattle rustling. ""Maybe," he said, looking at me kind of funny. "They don't know yet who. But somebody's been in down on Drew's range and killed Kinkaid, and they think there's cattle gone too""(Clark 29). Soon enough a posse is formed and the search begins and a couple hours into the search they come upon three men that have a few evidential things pointing towards them being the men guilty of cattle rustling and murdering the man of their town.