Regret In The Painted Door By Sinclair Ross

Regret is an incurable disease caused by lies, distortion, and falsehood. People often try to find a cure for this disease or try to believe that regret is something that is easy to cure, however, it is not. Once an individual make themselves believe in a lie they tell themselves, the pain and suffering that comes with regret will continue to linger for a lifetime. Sinclair Ross’s short story, “The Painted Door” highlights the idea that individuals who deceive themselves in the chase for happiness often create a lifetime of regret.

In the short story, it starts out with a prairie farm couple that have been married for seven years; John, “a slow unambitious man, content with his farm and cattle and is naively proud of Ann,” John would “enslave himself for fifteen hours a day” to give Ann pretty clothes, a mortgage-free farm and a new house. However, all Ann wants was “something about life; something about John.” But Ann did not speak about what she longs for John because every time she tells John to have a man to work beside him or to have break, John

This made Ann keep her thoughts to herself, she can’t complain about John’s love and devotion because all John wanted is the best for Ann. Sinclair Ross used the setting to symbolizes what John and Ann’s marriage is, “in winter, with roads impassable...that from a five the distance was more trebled to seventeen” has a direct connection with their marriage because like the roads being impassable, John and Ann’s