Options — Themes and Context

A Southern Editor’s Grandiloquent Vision

Colonel Telfair’s acceptance speech is a set piece of Southern oratory: he promises that The Rose of Dixie will “permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern minions their belief that no genius or good could exist” in the South. The speech follows a forty-minute arc that includes a survey of English literature and a Civil War battle. The colonel’s library, with its ten thousand volumes (some from 1861), reinforces his attachment to a bygone intellectual world. His white hair, “slightly frazzled at the ends,” and his punctilious handshake with each committee member suggest a man performing a role as much as living it.

Ethnology, Disappearance, and a Cherokee Scholar

High Jack Snakefeeder is introduced as “a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania college,” who writes essays and is “foolish about” Florence Blue Feather. Florence, “whiter than you are, and better educated than I ever was,” specializes in ethnology—the art of tracing descent “from jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O’Briens.” When she vanishes, High Jack takes to drink, a pattern the narrator observes: “when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink either just before or just after it happens.” The narrator’s own interest in Florence, visiting her when High Jack is away, adds a layer of rivalry.

Narrative Voice and Cultural Contrasts

The narrator’s voice is colloquial and wry, contrasting with High Jack’s academic pretensions. He describes listening to Florence’s “affidavits about the first families of the Land of Nod” with “incomprehension and respect,” while he entertains her with Bowery tales and “songs that I’d heard the Jamaica niggers sing.” The story juxtaposes high-flown ethnological discourse with streetwise humor. High Jack’s commission from the “Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology” to translate Mexican ruins parodies scholarly expeditions. The narrator’s casual racism and class assumptions are embedded in the texture of the prose, marking the period’s attitudes.

Readers approaching Options should attend to O. Henry’s use of frame narrators and embedded voices. The colonel’s ornate speech and the narrator’s slangy anecdotes operate in different registers, yet both reveal characters performing identity. The collection rewards attention to how O. Henry layers cultural references—from Chaucer to Cherokee ethnology—within compact, ironic tales.

Reading about Colonel Telfair’s ornate speech made me think of my grandfather’s tall tales, how he’d wrap a simple fishing story in Greek myth. I felt that same layered warmth once, years ago, in International Short Stories: French — Reading Notes, where every voice carried its own quiet history. Those books sit beside each other on my shelf, like old friends who’ve never met.