Strawberry Spring

“Springheel Jack… I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how they take me back.”

The story’s opening lines frame the narrative as a flashback about the narrator’s past. The lines contain a note of nostalgia. After the story ends, we read these lines with a tone of foreboding. In retrospect, the casualness with which the narrator recalls events is chilling.

“I saw myself on nationwide TV—the Walter Cronkite Report. Just a hurrying face in the general background behind the reporter, but my folks picked me out right away. They called long-distance. My dad wanted my analysis of the situation […]. My mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn't want to come home. I was enchanted.”

Later in the paragraph, the narrator establishes himself as a bystander to the events that took place. He is literally in the background. This section establishes the narrator’s fascination with strawberry spring, which compelled him to stay on campus and provides a clue to his motive.

“What happened at New Sharon Teachers’ College that particular strawberry spring […] there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has figured it out, they've never said.”

The idea of a seasonal cycle corresponding with the cyclical nature of the killings suggests that the killer, like a werewolf, is unable to resist the urge that strawberry spring triggers in him. Having Springheel Jack as the narrator’s murderous alter ego gives the story a supernatural overtone. Readers must decide if they believe the narrator committed the murders deliberately, although in a dissociated state, or if he was subject to mystical or psychological powers he could not control.