When people try to describe O. Henry’s writing style, they always use the term “smile with tears,” which implies his unusual way of thoughts and endings about every story. These stories usually end in a humorous but also cruel kind of way. 

“The Cactus” is a very bright example of such stories. The analyzed short story was written in 1882. This story deals with emotional suffering of the main character, whose name is   Trysdale. He dwells about his beloved who has just given herself to another man. Trysdale is rooting for the reason which spoiled their relation and made him suffer. The character realizes that his own pride, pretence, dissimulation and ignorance wrecked their relation and, as a result, his life.

The  basic theme of this story is how false pride and lack of knowledge could spoil one`s life. This story is also about distrust which leads to misunderstanding. Being too vainglorious and having not enough courage to tell the truth  his lovely woman,  Trysdale  loses her forever.

The events of the extract presented in a specific detailed way.  Having returned from the wedding of the beautiful young woman whom he had assumed he would marry, into his bachelor appartment,  Trysdale rues his vanity and conceit. Trysdale`s  stream of consciousness shows his inner suffrage and, at the same time, bewilderment, he puts rhetorical questions  (“Why had it ended thus? There had been no quarrel between them, nothing?”). The language of this story  is not so plain as it seems to be. In order to understand the massage, the story needs to be reread, because a huge diversity of shades of meaning, which are hided between lines. The language of this story is rather sophisticated, as it is full of various metaphors, metonymies and other stylistic devices (“As she had slowly moved up the aisle toward the altar he had felt an unworthy, sullen exultation that had served to support him”).

From the point of view of presentation  the text is mostly 3rd person narrative with the insertion of direct speech.