A Rapid Demonstration of Deconstruction of a Structuralist Reading

        This is one student's (successful) Structuralist reading of "A Very Short Story":

        "Ernest Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story” is structured by recurring binary oppositions of maturity and immaturity. The most explicit example occurs in Luz’s letter to the main character, where she refers to their relationship as “only a boy and girl affair” and “only a boy and girl love” (Hemingway 66). Though she never uses the words “man” and “woman,” her comparison of the old relationship with the new implies these concepts.
        The rest of the binary oppositions are more symbolic. The main character goes under anesthesia “holding tight on to himself” so he doesn’t “blab” or become “silly” and “talky,” both of which describe typical childhood behavior, in childish language as well. Silence and seriousness are clearly the preferred, or privileged, side of the binary. Marriage is probably the most important binary in the whole story, since the adjective “married” appears five times and the verb “marry” once. The main character and Luz “feel” married and want to “be married” officially, and Luz later “expect[s]” to get married to the major in spring (65-66), while the threat of remaining “unmarried” hovers ominously over the entire story. Similarly, the focus on getting a “job” (used three times) and starting a “career” implies the privative opposite of having no job, no career (66).
        All of these binaries rely on symbols, or culturally determined signs, to structure the story’s underlying conflict of maturity vs. immaturity. To Americans and most other Westerners, “silly” and “talky” are both words used to describe children and words used by children themselves. Adults are much more serious and certainly should not “blab.” Marriage is an even stronger indicator of maturity, since marrying before the age of eighteen had become rare by Hemingway’s time. Similarly, children do not have jobs, and even young adults are not likely to have careers, a word denoting a job that is long-term and financially adequate. This clear opposition of maturity and immaturity helps construct Hemingway’s more complicated, nuanced representation of his main character’s maturity levels.
        Hemingway’s main character meets the age requirements for maturity, since he tries to get married, plans to get a job, and wants to behave like an adult; the problem lies in his inability to actually do these things. His fiancée breaks the engagement, referring to him as a “boy.” No job is ever mentioned. He ends up contracting gonorrhea from a “sales girl” (66). Interestingly enough, Luz can’t seem to become more than a “girl” herself; she never marries that major. The story ends there.
        The inability of these characters to meet the demands of maturity leaves them both on the privative, immature side of the central binary, and this in turn provides a key to interpreting the text as a whole. The fact that the characters are a soldier and a nurse who meet during a war is a strong statement on Hemingway’s part. In European and American literature, war and the soldiers who carry it out are traditionally glorified; but Hemingway’s hero and heroine cannot even mature adequately, let alone become ideals. Therefore, its binary opposition allows readers to understand “A Very Short Story” as a text that challenges culturally accepted notions of war and exposes its real psychological effects on people.
 

        This is how Deconstruction shows that the reading "deconstructs":

        "To Decon this, you would have to demonstrate that there was an excluded middle term (they have to announce the banns--"blab"--or they cannot marry) or demonstrate that marriage and solitary life are not really binaries (how many married people were separated and lived in solitude because of that war, essentially returned to their "immature" state despite marriage?; how many of them had to "blab" a great deal to try to preserve the relationship, as when Luz sends all those letters that he never answers?). So the Decon reading would be to say that although EH structures the story to deliver the myth you discovered, it also yields these other meanings which deconstruct the myth's privileged/unprivileged binaries and suggests other truths about love in war time."  The "immature/mature" binary also deconstructs because children can be "mature for their age" (like adults) and adults, famously, can act "immaturely" (like children), and in this story, "mature" behavior appears associated with promise-breaking (Luz to "him," the Italian major to Luz) rather than truth-telling, and there also might be a whole cascading slippage of immaturities that results.  The major's "maturity" makes Luz behave to "him" in an im-mature fashion (her childish syntax in the letter paraphrases), and her assertion of "maturity" to "him" causes "him" to become im-mature, mating with a "salesgirl" in a cab.  Several of you noticed the fit between Frye's summer=romance and winter=irony/satire: what kind of "Romance" or "marriage" causes the partners to reproduce a disease? 
        Notice that I went outside "the text itself" for knowledge about war's effects on relationships like marriage. You are free to do that (especially historically) with Wheatley's poem, but cite your sources if it's not common knowledge. Also make sure you consult the OED for her peculiar usages and watch her spellings. Non-standard spelling is not "illegal" in her era, but it's increasingly rare, so it's fair to call such things potentially subversive signifiers. Think about JD's "words under erasure" and the way he makes "differance" and "deferance" fuse together to form a third and undecideable term."
 

Note that Structuralism teaches that narratives are governed by a great many structuring rules, just like the grammar and usage rules that enable this sentence to function.  All the rules depend on one another, so that when one rule can be shown to lose its grip, the rest will follow (Saussure's "transformation" rule for linguistic systems).  So even if you were tracking another structuring rule in your analysis of the story, yours also could reliably be demonstrated to deconstruct.