As Louise reflects on the death of Brently Mallard, her grief gives way to a far more powerful feeling: a sense of joy in her own freedom. Louise realizes that she will feel sad when she sees Brently's "kind, tender hands clasped in death", but she also realizes that for the first time in years, she actually wants to live. While Louise is intoxicated by this newfound joy, Josephine, who fears that Louise will harm herself in her anguish over Brently's death, begs her to leave the locked room and come downstairs. As the two women descend the stairs, Brently Mallard walks through the front door. Chopin comments: "he was far from the scene of the accident and did not even know that there had been one." Upon seeing her husband, Louise suffers a heart attack and dies. This simple superficial action belies the complexities of the prose style. The first sentence of “The Story of an Hour” reads: “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was suffering from a heart condition, great care was taken to speak to her as gently as possible. the news of her husband's death. If we approach this sentence simply as a factual statement, we might say that it conveys three messages: Mrs. Mallard has a heart condition; Mrs. Mallard's husband is deceased; someone took great care to inform Mrs. Mallard of her husband's death. However, if we analyze how we do this in the sentence, we discover a more complex layer of meaning. The first word of the sentence, namely, introduces a participial sentence. A reader expects, and grammatical usage requires, that a primary position participle modifies the subject of the following independent clause. Chopin violates our expectations. As we move forward into the participial phrase and the independent medium of the paper......s. If we look at the story as a whole, we realize that the disturbing effect of the first sentence is heightened as we encounter instances of disjunction and pronominalization, ambiguity and diminution of agents. Our positive feelings about Louise's assertiveness are nuanced word for word. Although Louise struggles with a few moments of fearful anticipation, her progress toward self-affirmation relies on "news" and "veiled clues," and she surrenders to an undefined "something" without stopping to wondering if it is or not. a “monstrous joy”. Even if we would like to follow it, the road is closed to us. The cumulative experience of the text does not allow such simple complicity. pp 29-32