Elements in writing are masterful in conveying ideas. A silent room in a hospital is the setting of the short story Eli, from Vincent Lam’s novel, Bloodletting and Miraculous cures. A notorious man named Eli, is arrested by two officers, a male and female, and brought to a hospital for medical attention to be given by Doctor Fitzgerald. The short story illustrates the use of three key elements: foreshadowing, theme and conflict.
The author uses the element of foreshadowing to make the reader think ahead and anticipate the conflict, dilemma or predicament. This type of the device comes in play at first when Eli has a conversation with the doctor in the silent room. After the conversation, the doctor learns about some information on how Eli attains his cut on his head and later confronts the police officers. During the dialogue, the female officer emphasizes that the doctor should “watch [himself] with Eli” telling him that “[Eli] is quick.” As the story develops, the statement then proves to be a turning point in the short story. As the doctor stitches the cut on Eli's head, “[he] [lunges] quickly” with a “flashing surge of movement” to take a bite out of the doctors hand. The new cut on the doctor’s glove is later identified to be contaminated with HIV.
The author heavily explores the theme of deception. Fitzgerald as a doctor, is being extremely deceitful. Although doctors are under oath to treat all patients equally, Fitzgerald is hurting Eli indirectly. After being bitten by Eli, he makes a proposal to police officer to brutalize him, inflicting on him “multiple bruises on his limbs and torso.” Additionally, the theme of deception comes in play when the police lie to the doctor about Eli obtaining his cut on his head by falling down while in custody; but Eli later reveals to the doctor that the police hit him with a “sucker punch” because he did not answer an interrogation question. The main truth is that the two professions, the doctor and the police, will never reach a true solution for a problem if they keep deceiving each other.
Equally important, conflict is a very useful element that the author employs. First, the author engages the reader by using conflict between doctor Fitzgerald and the police officers in form of a dialogue. They both keep valuable information from each other; the officers conceal the fact that Eli was brutalized by them and the doctor never reveals to the officers that Eli has the HIV virus. This leads to a series of confrontations between the two occupations and brings about minimal trust. Additionally,Vincent Lam utilizes the conflict of the doctor versus his thoughts. In this case, the doctor has an internal conflict when he tries to decide what will be best solution to be given to Eli to make him "learn respect" after Eli took a bite of his hand. Also, the doctor has to choose between 'creating clean paperwork" for Eli and inflicting pain and suffering on both Eli and the police because he blames both the parties for the bite on his hand. Later on, he chooses inflicting pain on Eli by darting a "tongue depressor.... further into [Eli's] mouth" until he grunts and gags for while as well as planting a "scissors on the stretcher within the reach" of Eli's right hand so as to cause suffering to the police officers.
Thus, the elements Vincent Lam employs in his short story which include foreshadowing, the use of theme and conflict, are the three key writing styles that brings out a deeper understanding of the relationship between the doctor, officers and Eli. Also, these writing components reveal the motive of each character in the short story which readers realize and anticipate the next possible predicament or dilemma in the story. This goes to show that the uses of writing elements are extremely important in bringing out the main issues in a piece of writing.
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