Discuss the title of the short story The Last Leaf and show its appropriateness.

Discuss the title of the short story The Last Leaf and show its appropriateness.

A precise and meaningful title bears out well the health as well as depth of a short story. This is well applicable to O Henry's short story The Last Leaf. The engaging story here has a very smart and felicitous title that serves to emphasize its effect.

The term 'the last leaf signifies the leaf that remains alone after the fall of all other leaves of a certain tree. In O Henry's story, the last leaf was of a vine tree that crept along an old brick wall. In the severe cold, the storm and the rain of November, the leaves of that vine tree dropped down one after another. The last leaf remained only awaiting its fall in the coming night. But the last leaf did not fall, at least that appeared to be so to Johnsy, a weak, ailing young woman, laid down with a biting attack of pneumonia.

Johnsy was a young, aspirant painter, who lived with her friend, Sue, and set up a studio with her in the artists' colony, situated close to the west of Washington Square. As she lay helplessly ill, a poor victim of the unsparing disease pneumonia, she grew morose, melancholy- minded and thoroughly despondent. She was even haunted with a strange premonition of her coming death. From her bed, through the window, she could see an old vine tree, standing on an old brick wall. She also saw how its leaves, terribly swayed and shaken by the rain and the storm of cold November, dropped down one after another.

That sight had a haunting effect on her morbid mood. She was possessed of a strange and shocking sensation. She began to fancy, no doubt without any rhyme or reason, that she would die with the fall of the last leaf of the vine tree. That had a dangerous impact on her health and mind. She lost her interest in life and awaited death gloomily. with the fall of the last leaf.

But strangely enough, the last leaf did not fall at all. The rough and stormy nights rolled on, yet the last leaf continued to float all by itself. That was a lesson for the despondent young artist. She realised her mistake and admitted that "it is a sin to want to die', and was restored to the hope for life and its charm. She recovered from her illness and regained her aspiration for painting 'the Bay of in Naples." All those changes in Johnsy were effected by the lasting last leaf.

But Johnsy did not know that the last leaf was no real, natural leaf. It was a leaf, painted in the place of that very last leaf on the very night of its fall. That was done by the old painter Behrman who had thereby achieved his long speculated masterpiece in painting. That unreal leaf, rather the leaf of art, did the wonder to revive in a drooped heart, drawn to death, the lust for life.

The leaf, rather the last leaf, remains prominent in the theme of the story all through, both as a natural one and as an artificial one. Johnsy awaited the fall of the last leaf, no doubt natural, and was certain of her death with that. Again, the leaf, painted by old Behrman, restored her faith in the living world and bred in her a zeal for life. The last leaf, waiting for its natural fall, stood to her as a symbol of death, whereas the painter's leaf shone before her as the inspiration for life.

Indeed, the term 'the last leaf forms the keystone of the whole story.

It steers and shapes the theme and sponsors the very lesson of the story. As the title of the story, it is definitely most befitting, appropriate to the theme as well as spirit of O Henry's story-The Last Leaf.