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!