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

It’s interesting how, in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” Baldwin uses quintessential scenes to illustrate his points. We talked about this in class today, especially with the scene of the narrator and Harriet on the Pont Royal bridge with the “golden statue of Joan of Arc, her sword uplifted” and “the sun [falling] over everything” (Baldwin 157-8). Baldwin uses this moment, the stereotypical, beautiful scene overlooking the water with the sun shining in Paris, to emphasize the beauty and importance of the narrator’s epiphany at that moment. The narrator realizes, standing there and arguing with Harriet, that he could feel alone with this woman: “there were millions of people all around us, but I was alone with Harriet” (Baldwin 158). He didn’t have to feel self-conscious about what people might think when they seem him, a black man, with this white woman. He was alone with Harriet and didn’t have to “carry the menacing, the hostile, killing world, with [him] everywhere” anymore

When I first read “Teddy,” I was reminded of that one scene in Harry Potter: the Half-Blood Prince where Dumbledore first meets young Tom Riddle/Voldemort at his orphanage. It seems kind of random, but Teddy reminds me a lot of Tom Riddle’s character, so I’m just going to list a bunch of similarities I see between the two. Just hear me out friends. Okay first, Teddy and Tom Riddle both come from pretty broken families. Tom comes from a very ancient Wizarding family noted for a vein of instability and violence that flourished through the generations due to their habit of marrying their own cousins. Lack of sense coupled with a great liking for grandeur meant that the family gold was squandered several generations before [he] was born. (Rowling 212) Long story short, his mother, who was abused by his grandfather, uses a love potion to make his father fall in love with her, so they marry, but then the father finds out about the love potion and leaves the mother, so Tom grows

We saw Tim O’Brien criticize war through his stories along the war front in The Things They Carried . Now we see George Saunders comment on the war at home. He does this by drawing attention to people’s problematic reactions to Mikey’s involvement in the war. The most notable example of this is the frequently repeated, almost mechanical “thank you for your service” that the sheriff, Ryan’s dad, and the boy in the shop say to Mikey. Superficially, this seems very respectful, like they really appreciate Mikey risking his life for them and his country. However, as soon as they say “thank you for your service,” they have done their bit, so to speak, of properly honoring the troops. In those five words, they basically shed any and all other obligations that they might have to do anything else to help Mikey the veteran. When the sheriff helps kick Mikey and his family out of their house, almost the first thing he says to Mikey is, “thank you for your service,” and then he proceeds to ad

I sort of get what O’Brien is trying to do in this book. Or maybe I don’t get it, because I’m not a veteran of the Vietnam War and so I can’t possibly begin to understand O’Brien’s experiences. But I think he’s trying to convey what he defines as the real “truth”—the feelings of the war, the levels of terrible and heartbreaking and disorientation that non-veterans are unable to relate to—by throwing away “happening-truth” and telling us fake stories. Here’s how he does it. You become engrossed in O’Brien’s stories. Once you’re inside, they chew you up and wreck you emotionally. Then you’re spit out feeling confused, disoriented, and all kinds of angry when O’Brien tells you hey, by the way, I made that up. Like, how can you make up a story about your best friend Kiowa drowning in poop? How can you talk about these really sentimental moments with your daughter Kathleen, when you really don’t have a daughter named Kathleen? Take “Good Form,” for example. It comes right after the