Analysis and interpretation of Judy Troy’s ”The Order of Things”
Sigurd Storgaard 2.e

Everybody can fall in love. Even the most settled people with a wife and children can suddenly fall in love with another woman or vice versa. This is the order of things, but it may seem like a hackneyed truism that everybody at every age can abruptly in the middle of the hardships of the everyday feel the hair-raising feeling of being in love. When it happens to a settled person it causes him or her a lot of ethical consideration. But when the feeling is strong enough people, at least Carl and Lily, find it okay to cheat on their spouses.
Carl and Lucy are the main characters in Judy Troy’s short story “The Order of Things”. It is a short story that among other things deals with the issues put forward. It is about a reverend, Carl, and a woman, Lily, who fall in love. They live in a small town called Worland and they are both settled and married. They have a romantic love affair on a trip, but when they come back it is hard for them to find the right time to see each other. After all, they start dating in the church on weekdays – they are in love like teenagers and they want to get married. But on the iciest winter day Lily dies accidently. Carl is left alone with a broken heart.
Carl also seems like the subject of the narration due to the fact the narrator can go in and out of his internal thoughts. Everything is seen through his eyes, “Carl forced himself to say, although he couldn’t imagine getting back into his car…” (ll. 21-22). Overall we are dealing with a third person narrator who tells the story past tense, but the narrator is bound to the main character Carl.
Carl is a very reasonable man in a conventional sense. He has a fine job, a wife and a daughter. He is in his early forties and has lived for a year in Worland. But through the story, especially when he meets