Jane Stern's scene descriptions are usually intense and full of anxiety because she is mostly nervous about any of the emergency situations. Usually when she receives a call, she knows what she has to do, but she sometimes fails to complete her task. Therefore, other EMTs take over her job in the beginning. Later on, she becomes accustomed to the emergencies, and takes action herself without failing. Regardless, she still has anxiety in her writing most likely because she has depression and a few other forms of psychological problems regarding anxiety. In one of the scenes, there was an emergency call from a person saying that her baby had drowned. When she reached the scene, she assumed that she would see a small, dead body. However, she saw an object covered in a big sheet. At this point, she had to walk over and open the sheet to see the dead body. She uses a form of repetition to raise intensity in the reader as she is moving closer to the dead body because it was the part that the real dead body was about to be discovered. Her use of anaphora clearly created the setting of the situation because I imagined the lifeless mass on the table covered with a large sheet. After using the letter "I" in the beginning of every sentence throughout the paragraph, she built a nervous and curious mood for the reader. After every sentence the intensity increased more and I became more scared to find out if it was an actual baby. Her last sentence, which stated, "I lift the blanket off and see a gigantic dead Great Dane" (Stern 170) relieved the entire situation down because now the reader imagined the setting in a way that a little baby was not included. Not only did this part make he reader nervous, but it also showed that Stern was extremely nervous herself, which is important because she has depression, making her react differently to situations.
Setting and Mood