Shiloh - Week Five
Tristan Riesen
Bobbie Ann Mason’s story Shiloh was an interesting take on a working class couple from the south. I think Mason does a great job a portraying people like this. Brought up in Kentucky I would imagine a lot of her writing revolves around people very similar to Leroy Moffitt, Norma Jean Moffitt, and her mother Mabel. Like we talked about in class, the story has a lot to do with what is implied. It’s one of those stories (I’ve read some like this before I just can’t recall which) that the action which takes place off screen, is just as important as the action that actually takes place in the story.
In a way, I felt bad for both Leroy and Norma Jean. I felt bad for Leroy because he was just kind of a loser, and I think most of us have friends whom we’ve seen lose their drive and their sense of being through situations like losing their job, or being hurt in an accident, or in Leroy’s case – both. He self medicates in several different ways. First he kind of just feels bad for himself, but I don’t think he really overdoes it. I can imagine a wreck like that would not only be incredibly painful, but a fear would linger long after the accident. He smokes a lot of pot, which is fine, but I think it may be affecting him more than he realizes. I thought there might be some negative effects from smoking when he is looking at Norma Jean and he remembers the hitchhikers whom he would tell his life story to. At that moment he wants to tell Norma Jean his life story just like the hitchhikers. In the paragraph, his thoughts kind of spiral down like Alice in the rabbit hole. By the end of the paragraph and his train of thought, he has forgotten why he even wanted to tell her.
As for Norma, she was obviously a very strong woman, and I couldn’t help but feel like she was being let down by the world. She wasn’t just let down by Leroy, but by her mother, and she was especially let down by her fleeting experience with motherhood. Forced into a marriage because of an unwanted birth, having the child, and then having it die in the end was a cruel twist to her life. The story was consistent in its theme of various relationships. Relationships between mothers young and old, fathers, babies, and even sons in law and mothers in law.