Short Stories & Tall Stacks of Pancakes

We’ve had a lot of stories so far about not-so-great fathers: “The Rockpile,” “What is Seized,” and now “Fiesta, 1980.” They contain similar plot elements and characteristics in the fathers that cause us to dislike them. For instance, the coldness that made us hate the father in “What is Seized” is also present in a glimpse in “Fiesta, 1980.” When Papi supposedly comes home from seeing “that Puerto Rican woman,” “he didn’t say nothing to nobody, not even my mom. He just pushed past her, help up his hand when she tried to talk to him and headed right into the shower.” This is somewhat similar to the father in “What is Seized,” who “turned his head away from [the mother], and afterward would give her a hard angry gaze, roll stiffly over to his side of the bed, face the wall, shake her off of him,” if she ever touched him. Both of these father figures don’t show any affection whatsoever toward their wives, and it’s really sad to see. Another similarity is between the dads in “The Ro...

When I read Lorrie Moore’s “How,” it just seemed to drone on. It repeated the same phrases over and over again, like “a week, a month, a year” and “an endless series of tests,” which made the story seem endless. While I don’t think that these repetitions made it the most exciting story to read, they did help me better understand how the narrator is feeling and where she is coming from. The entire story is about how she is bored with her relationship and is trying to find ways to get out of it, so what better way to convey her boredom than repeating the same words so that the reader also becomes bored? I still liked this story though and found it pretty different from some of the others we’ve read in Self-Help so far. For one thing, the plot elements in it are very vague. The narrator starts by saying, “Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory….” All of these details seem cho...