What overall feeling do you get when you read The Locket by Kate Chopin?Does this mood change at all throughout the reading? If so, how? What...

The feeling I get when I read this short story is one of
mystery. The author sets the stage for this right from the very beginning when she
describes the locket as some sort of good luck charm. When one of the men
says:

That's a
charm; some kind of hoodoo business that one o' them priests gave him to keep him out o'
trouble.

One gets the idea
that something important is going to be associated with this locket. Later, when the
soldier is found dead with the locket around his neck, the reader is let down, because
he has been hoping that the locket would offer some sort of protection. The second part
of the story, however, contains a lot of foreshadowing that some irony is going to pop
up, especially if one is familiar with Kate Chopin’s writing. She always has an ironic
twist at the end of the story. So when Octavie is riding along with her lover’s father
and he asks her to remove her mourning veil, the reader gets the idea that there must be
some reason. Then, he tells her that on such a beautiful spring day, one can almost
believe in miracles. At the end, the reader realizes that a miracle of sorts occurs,
because Octavie’s soldier is not dead after all. The one found dead with the locket was
not her lover, but someone who had stolen the locket. How
ironic!