Resume

Parker’s poem links to many different genres. In it, Parker mocks a fatal issue; this humorous yet critical presentation of death lends itself to satire even as it teaches a lesson: Choose life over death. Since “Résumé” contains a moral, it is considered a didactic poem, in addition to being a satirical one. The speaker wants the reader to learn something specific about death by suicide, so they dictate a message, and the poem carries a clear takeaway: Life is less adverse than death by suicide. The speaker directs this message at an unnamed “you” (Lines 1, 3, 8), turning the poem into a letter or an epistle (epistola is Latin for “letter”). With the epistolary genre, the reader feels as if they are reading the private communication between the speaker and the mysterious “you.” Since the poem is on the short side and expresses the speaker’s feelings, it is also a lyric.

The identity of the speaker is debatable. From the view of the authorial context, the speaker is Dorothy Parker.