The Harvest Poem Analysis

Toward the beginning of the story, the sick friend jokingly references Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who devised the five stages of grief, stating, “I can’t remember… What does Kubler-Ross say comes after denial?” to which the narrator inwardly responds that anger must be next (41). This shows that while her friend may be closer to the final stage of grief, acceptance, the narrator is still deeply in denial, and although she knows the answer to her friend’s question she cannot bring herself to say it out loud. She cannot contemplate losing her friend, and even the joking mention to the stages of grief is too much for her to handle, rendering her speechless. This interaction also seems to be foreshadowing an incident that transpires between the

In addition, it seems that “The Harvest” much like “In the Cemetery” is another example of Hempel using her own tragic experience as a starting point for her fiction. In the story, the eighteen year old narrator is riding in the car with a married man she’s having an affair with when they get into an accident that almost costs her one of her legs. However, halfway through the story, the narrator reveals that most everything she has relayed has been exaggerated in some way. Through this story Hempel subtly exposes truths of human

However, later in the story, the narrator reveals that much like the exaggerated number of stitches she received, she had claimed that this man was married, when in fact he was not, and as it so happens, he later married a wealthy model despite his claims that looks are not immediately important. It seems that the narrator is revealing the senseless and shallow nature of human beings, who want to be viewed in a particular light, and often change certain aspects of their character in order to maintain this view, much like the narrator changes or exaggerates aspects of her story to make it more appealing to her audience.
The setting of this story is also reminiscent of “In the Cemetery” because the majority of it takes place in a hospital. Hempel often writes about those who are in crisis-- often in the hospital or in recovery-- and “The Harvest” is a clear example of this tendency. While recovering in the hospital, the narrator mentions a twelve-year-old boy she frequently sees when she goes to the dialysis ward to watch