short story responses weeks 2-7

[writetaylor]

People like that are the only people here:

By Lorrie Moore

            I was struck by this story’s dark sensibility. The mother’s vulnerability is crippling and tragic, and shows an almost Freudian need for mother’s to protect and get the best for their children. I was particularly affected by this story today because I have a family member who just had her baby prematurely, and the baby is in the ICU, although the baby is fine, the mother’s reaction is irrational and hyper-protective, and turns almost cynical, just like the narrator in Lorrie Moore’s People Like That are the Only People Here.

            This story is gothic and satirical in its description of the medical institution. For example,  doctors are supposedly a high priests of knowledge, yet the doctor in this story is absolutely ridiculous. He has a fake tan, very white teeth, obviously plays TOO much tennis (which I found very comical), and   addresses the mother with little respect, and speaks more about his vacation than the baby’s diagnosis.

 

How to Tell a True War Story

By Tim O’Brien

            Just the title of this story evokes a very ironic feeling. A how-to on how to tell the truth presumes that telling the truth is a difficult thing. Many authors have played with this idea. Most memorably, Kurt Vonnegut The absurdity war warrants stories such How to Tell a True War Story, By Tim O’Brien.  The story line is melodramatic like a soap opera, with death and love and other strife, this absurdity reflects the absurdity of war and the rest of it.

O’Brien says sometimes a true war story cannot be believed because some of the most unbearable parts are true, while some of the normal parts are not. Sometimes, he says, a true war story is impossible to tell. 

 

Shiloh

By Bobbie Anne Mason

            There is something to be said for the construct of the dead beat husband and uber-motivated wife. There is something oddly stereotypical in a reverse way that angered me about this story. Leroy is a stereotype in himself, jobless, helpless, unhelpful pot head who buys his weed from a teenager. His existence is pitiful and has essentially no redeeming qualities.

            On the other end of the spectrum, his wife is going back to school and trying to make something out of herself, and her husband Leroy is just dragging her down. Bobbie Anne Mason flipped the paradigm of the normal domestic archetype, and in doing that there was something sad and obvious about the story. Which only heightens the drama of the story. Its obviousness saddens the lives of the characters. Even in their struggle are they just like everybody else.

 

Sonny’s Blues

By James Baldwin

            Two siblings. One with a drug addiction, one with all the responsibility. This set up also mirrors the strife of a past generation so that the conclusion is prophesized and therefore imminent. This dynamic between the two siblings is played out over and over, not only in fiction, but in real life.

 The music that Sonny plays and loves is based less on a strict formal order than on a pure expression of the soul. Bebop, as it came to be known, was a radical new form of jazz. For musicians like Sonny, the freedom of expression that came with bebop was a chance to live freely, defy social conventions and norms, and create something utterly original. For many of the great musicians of that era, drugs were a constant temptation. Sonny’s stated musical hero, Charlie Parker, was himself addicted to drugs and died a very early death partly as a result. At the end of the story, the narrator witnesses Sonny’s playing firsthand. The experience is similar to the religious revival the narrator witnessed earlier, with one major exception: there is a real redemption available through the music.

Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/sonnys-blues/section1.rhtml

 

Car Crash While Hitchhiking

By Denis Johnson

            This has been, hands down, one of my favorite short stories that I have ever read. I idolize Denis Johnson, and his collection from which Car Crash While Hitchhiking comes from, Jesus’ Son is one of my favorite books of all time. The central character, or as I imagine it, a central character, is both unreliable and raw and believable. Supposedly Johnson wrote the anthology with the idea that the stories could be narrated by any number of dead-beat male characters living in rural Iowa in the 1970s.

            The reason that I picture one narrator is because of the 1999 film adaptation of Jesus’ Son, which is also an excellent film. Beautiful and literary, and true, I believe to Johnson’s vision.