The Rocking-Horse Winner

"But the boy died in the night." "The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D.H. Lawrence is a story mainly about greed. Paul's mother did not love her kids, but she loved money. Trying to be a good son, and possibly try and fill in for his father who did not make a ton of money, Paul gave his mother $1000 a year for 5 years; giving her some of his winnings from the horse races. Paul's mother was not happy with the small sums of money each year and wanted the money in full. She was never happy. When Paul finally won a ton of money in the Derby, he left it all to his mother because she needed it. Greed overcame her and in return she lost her son to death. This story has some elements of man vs. the supernatural as Paul struggled to do good by winning his mother money by riding on his rocking-horse where he received visions about who was going to win the horse races.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

""But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment..." This quote on page 909 in the story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor is a foreshadow of things to come. Not only is it foreshadowing, that whole page had me laughing. I can just imagine two kids running around screaming "We've had an ACCIDENT" and the grandmother suddenly realizing that the house was in Tennessee. I found it interesting that all the kids had names, her son, Bailey, and Bailey's kids, June Star and John Wesley, but the grandmothers name is never mentioned, nor is Bailey's wife's name. I'm not quite sure why that is. Maybe because the grandmother kind of acts like a typical mother-in-law, trying to be a part of her kid's life, so the author didn't name her because she can be anybody. But then again, not every mother-in-law is shot off the side of a dirt road...

The Lottery

"Nancy and Bill, Jr., opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads." Shirley Jackson wrote this quote in her story, "The Lottery". I read the paragraph over and over again because I just couldn't fathom the fact that these kids knew that somebody in their family was going to die and they were beaming and laughing. Even though I knew that my life was going to be saved knowing that my mother was going to be murdered would seriously depress me. When I first read the story the fact that Mrs. Hutchinson was stoned to death came as a shock to me, just for the pure fact that her kids were so happy. It's a contrast to her own emotions though. As soon as she found out that it was her family that got picked by the lottery she immediately began making excuses why it should not be her family to be picked. She said that there was not enough time to have chosen the name.

Hills Like White Elephants

"On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun." In his story, "Hills Like White Elephants", Ernest Hemingway paints very vivid descriptions of his scenery. He really makes the reader feel like they are there with the characters. On the other hand though, Hemingway never gives any real description of the characters. We have no idea what thier situation involves, and Hemingway never explicitly comes out and says that the girls' operation is to have an abortion. I do not like when author's make it a guessing game to try and figure out what the story means. If I had not been in class, I totally would never have guessed that Hemingway was talking about having an abortion.

Young Goodman Brown

"Faith kept me back a while" said Goodman Brown in the story, "Young Goodman Brown". By just reading this sentence, one can easily assume that Goodman Brown was actually talking about faith, not Faith his wife. I think that Nathaniel Hawthorne purposefully named Brown's wife Faith. When you think of Faith you think of angelic things. In this story Hawthorne uses symbols to represent the innocense and angelic qualities of Faith. In the first paragraph, Hawthorne writes, "And Faith...thrust her own pretty head...letting the wind play with the pink ribbons on her cap". And as Brown met up with the traveller in the forest, the traveller held a serpent's staff - symbolic of devilish and evil things. In essence, Brown left his faith and God to meet up with the devil in the forest.

The Yellow Wallpaper

"The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others." This quote in "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a good example of how descriptions of colors can set the mood for the whole story. If Gilman had just said that the room was yellow the reader could either take that to mean it was a bright, sunny, happy yellow. In this case, however, since Gilman uses words such as smouldering, sickley and dull, the reader understands how ugly this wallpaper is.

A Rose For Emily

After reading the last paragraph in the story, A Rose For Emily, by William Faulkner, I found that my jaw had dropped in shock. The paragraph reads, "Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron - gray hair." This paragraph explains to the reader that Emily was sleeping next to the skeleton/dead body. This reminded me of an episode of Desperate Housewives. One of the characters, an elderly female, had kept the remains of her dead husband in a freezer in her basement. She kept him preserved on ice and talked to him daily. However, the difference is that she didn't kill her husband, while Emily killed Homer.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

When I read We Can Remember It For You Wholesale the second time, one sentence jumped out at me. On page 358, Philip Dick wrote, "Programming an artificial memory of a trip to another planet - with or without the added fillup of being a secret agent - showed up on the firm's work-schedule with monotonous regularity." This sentence shows the reader how popular Rekal Inc. is. Knowing that there are so many people wanting the memory of being a secret - agent disturbs me. Their whole society is being filled with lies and events that did not really happen. Eventually, the whole society is going to be made up of people who believe that they are secret agents. This bothers me because eventually someone's going to have to question the fact that everybody's been a secret agent at some point.

The Open Boat

After reading The Open Boat by Stephen Crane, the one image that popped into my head was something from Survivor. One of the lines that Crane wrote really stuck in my head. On pg. 351 the captain asks the correspondent, "Did you see that shark playing around?" The correspondent answers "Yes, I saw him. He was a big fellow, all right." Even though I don't think this was meant to be funny, whenever I picture it in my head I just chuckle a little bit. Here are three men, trapped in a boat, and the correspondent just answers so nonchalantly "Yea I saw the shark." To me, and maybe I'm reading the whole story wrong, these guys are so calm for having escaped death from the sinking boat and are now stuck in a tiny boat off the coast of Florida without food or freshwater!

The Story of an Hour

In the beginning of The Story of an Hour, Kate Chopin, refers to the main character as Mrs. Mallard. When Mrs. Mallard learns that her husband Brently Mallard has been killed in a train accident, Chopin writes, "She said it over and over under her breath: 'free, free, free!'". Her sister, Josephine then comes calling for her by her first name which is Louise. This shows that Louise Mallard is property of her husband, which is common for the times. She's elated to know that she's free of the duty of being a wife, as she says that "And yet she had loved him- sometimes". This makes me wonder if their marriage was possibly an arranged marriage, where they have grown to respect each other.
I found that the weather was ironic during the story. Louise says that, "she could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air...There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window". This weather parallels Louises' good mood. I found it ironic because usually when somebody dies, or something bad happens, the weather usually rainy, dark, gloomy, etc.

Paul's Case

Cather writes, "The carnations in his coat were drooping with cold, he noticed; their red glory over. It occured to him that all the flowers he had seen in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run."
While reading this quote, I began to wonder if, at the end of this paragraph, Cather was still talking about the carnations or about Paul. Paul's life can be compared to the carnation. While in the theater-setting Paul was in his element. He was as alive as the carnation was when Paul first wore it.
Then, Paul runs away to NYC. There, Paul's life isn't so glorious as it was. Cather writes, "The grey monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years - Sabbath School, Young People's Metting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over."
In the end Paul and the carnation are one and the same. They are both lifeless, and drooping.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

When I first read "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" it didn't really grab my attention, and I found that 3/4s into the story I found that I wasn't paying attention to the story and I had no idea what I just read. So I left it for the night and I reread it the next day and I found that the story was better the second time around. When I read it one sentence jumped out at me on page 273. That sentence was, "Simon Wheeler...reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he turned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm...(Clemens 272). I found that sentence quite strange because the whole story seemed like there was a suspense building. When I read the story the second time (I read the dialog parts outloud) I was making different voices for the different characters and I found that I really got into the story. I found it strange that Simon wouldn't have done the same thing.

The Other Duel

"They fought shoulder to shoulder yet they never, so far as is known, exchanged a single word(Borges, The Other Duel, Bohner 141)." The narrator of "The Other Duel" tells the reader about a few reasons why the protaginists of the story cannot stand each other. The narrator talks about a dispute over an unmarked cattle, relationships with a girl, and a game of cards, just to name a few.
As a reader I was questioning why, if these men hated each other so much, did they choose to be on the same side in the war and fight the same battles. I find it hard to believe that they would want to be on the same "team" as each other.
Then I thought to myself, how could these men fight next to each other day in and day out and never yell or fight or even say something to each other. Today, you see it all the time - men punching each other out over a girl, or at the very least, exchanging words. Especially since the narrator says that after Silveira and Cardoso played the game of truco, "It was then, I think, that they almost came to blows (Borges, The Other Duel, Bohner 141)." But then, I started thinking about the circumstances over why these guys hate each other so much. Is it because of the unmarked animal, card game or a girl? Sure, these things are enough to make you dislike someone but to hate them is kind of extreme.
So after reading this story a couple times, I began to question the narrators credibility. I began thinking that he is just exagerating a lot of the events in the story to make his story more enjoyable, therefore he can "flaunt" that he knows all this information and people will listen. So because I don't really believe the narrator too much, it's hard for me to try and figure out whats true and what's not.

An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge

"As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon - then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timers of the Owl Creek Bridge (Short Fiction, Bierce, 139)."
I chose these last two sentences of the story to write about for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I found it ironic. While reading the story the reader is left to believe that Peyton had escaped and had this adventure-filled journey back to his home. The escape is detailed throughout all of Part 3. Finally at the end of Part 3, the reader is just left with two sentences saying, "You thought wrong - Peyton is dead. End of story." I don't like when stories do this because throughout the story, the climax keeps building and then when you least expect it, the entire mood changes and you're left going, "Wait - how did this happen?"
The second reason I chose to write about these sentences was because there is such a contrast in them. The first sentence uses such strong words such as, "stunning blow", "blinding", "blazes" and "shock of a cannon". These words are so descriptive and forcefull, it really shows the reader how Peyton is feeling. Then the next sentence uses peaceful words such as, "swung gently", and "beneath the timbers". I liked how Bierce changed the mood so quickly like that, it made the reader feel at peace that Peyton had to die like that.
I had read this story back in the 8th grade, and I liked it then but reading it again in college made me understand more of the "Fictional elements" in the story and I got a better understanding of what Bierce was writing about.