Sherwood Anderson is known for creating characters, especially those whom he considers “grotesques,” or exaggerations of particular stereotypes. In “Death in the Woods,” his character of the old woman is an example of a grotesque in the same way as his characters in other short stories, such as those found in Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg. Anderson’s grotesques are unique to his time period: those left behind as the Western world industrialized in the period between 1750 and 1900. Industrialization created materialism and consumerism that Anderson’s characters seem to have trouble assimilating, so they are stuck in a limbo between the romanticism of a pre-industrial world and the stark reality of a modern one.

Anderson begins the story describing Mrs. Grimes as noteworthy for being unnoteworthy. His narration spans five sections that don’t follow any chronology, but instead function as pieces of a disjointed, unreliable telling of her life and his connection to it. The whole story is recounted by the narrator years after the incident, as he grapples with the details of the retelling in contrast to his brother’s version: “I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I” (Part 5, Paragraph 15).