The Use of Force starts with a character we immediately are told is a doctor, and the fact that this doctor narrates (and perhaps also that a doctor would be expected to be proper and responsible) meant when the parents eyed him 'up and down distrustfully' I wrote off their concern and sided immediately with the doctor, though by the end of the story I wonder if they'd picked up on something odd about his character! The doctor has strange relationship to the patient - 'I had fallen in love with the savage brat', 'it was a pleasure to attack her' and this direct access to his thoughts mean we see he battles himself as much as her & her half-compliant parents in trying to obtain the swab - convincing himself and the parents it is all in the name of the child's health, and trying to appear rational and restrained while we see he is whipped up in enjoyment of the violence.
The child's mutism until halfway through the story invites the question of her motivation in not allowing a simple procedure - is she just scared of the instrument or the doctor? After all the frantic shrieking and splintering and bleeding and assault in second half, with the fear that the rising tension might result in serious harm to the girl, the reveal is an odd kind of calm - the doctor finally sees what he was looking for, but it was not what he wanted to see, and could well be fatal for her. I finally discover the girl's motivation is more complex than I'd expected, and 'tears of defeat blinded her eyes' works so well as the last sentence: from the experience of crying as a release of tension, to the association of 'defeat' with finality, to her eyes blinding with tears as a filmic vision of the scene dissolving to black.
This is an astute reading. In the end, the huge threat that the child is fighting is not the doctor.
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