Why does narrator wish they had said "call it a day" instead of "supper"?Explain your response with reference to the text.

The narrator of the poem (who we can probably identify with the poet) is clearly conflicted about injecting subjectivity into his portrayal of the scene. The poem strives for realism, and the powerful understatement of the ending underscores the harsh realities of this time and place. However, in interesting ways, the poem also draws attention to the desires of the speaker to manipulate our experience of the poem as it is told. At times the speaker catches himself romanticizing the story through devices like metonymy and personification. "Call it a day I wish they might have said" is a clear example of the speaker projecting his desires onto the "reality" of the action. It is, of course, also foreshadowing.

Similarly, later in the poem, the speaker has to resist personifying the saw and thus potentially treating it as evil rather than just presenting it as the amoral object that it is: "At the word, the saw,/As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,/Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--/He must have given the hand. However it was,/Neither refused the meeting."

This overt struggle with realism marks much of Frost's work. In this regard, "Out, Out–" is very similar to a poem like "Birches."