Importance of Control in Stafford's Journey Through Darkness In William Stafford's "Traveling Through Darkness", the narrator encounters a dead deer at the edge of the road. He knows the safe and proper course of action is to push the deer into the canyon, but when he discovers that the doe was about to give birth before dying, he is reluctant to kill the unborn fawn. Stafford's central idea in the poem revolves around the narrator's decision to sacrifice the deer in order to clear the road of obstacles, so that other people driving on the dark, narrow road would not have to make a gap. The image of the deer evokes sympathy and compassion from the reader because the image is not simply that of a dead animal. The second stanza describes the dead deer as the reader expects. The narrator “stood near the pile, a doe, a recent murder; / she had already stiffened, almost cold.” The lifeless deer, a mere mass of recently killed animals on the road, seems ready to be pushed into the canyon, but the next stanza inverts the image of the deer. The narrator approaches ...