A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails: Donald Hall

          A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails by Donald Hall is about the pointlessness of life, and how it can still bring joy. Its start is quite melancholy, with the author saying, “I was always aware that New Hampshire was more dead than alive” (Hall 252). Hall recounts the life of a man he knew when he was young, Washington. Hall's writing invokes Washington's bucolic past as a hermit who could fix and build just about anything. The poetry connoisseur from the mid 1900's shows through Washington how he feels about the place he grew up. Washington lives a simple life in New Hampshire, and dies only remembered by his family. Washington has an abhorrence for wasting things, as is seen from his saving of nails, food, and even short pieces of string. The readers are presumed to not be from New Hampshire, and not know the feeling that Hall conveys, about everything around them slowly decaying. Hall wrote this piece to show a way of life that appealed to many, but few could experience.

       I believe that Hall did accomplish his purpose, because he detailed a life that was fleeting and barely remembered, but that still made Washington happy. In his final sentence Hall says, “and his gestures have assumed the final waste of irrelevance” (Hall 262). This ending is sad, but it also shows the bigger motive, of showing how the whole New Hampshire way of life has faded too. Hall uses many rhetorical devices to highlight this, but the one that stood out the most to me is the parallelism between how he told the story and how Washington would tell his stories. Washington would ramble on forever, one thing leading to another thing, and that is exactly how Hall tells his story. This shows how while Washington was gone, his small impact on the world is not forgotten, and lives on through Hall.

New Hampshire Winter by Joe Dorn