Short Stories & Tall Stacks of Pancakes

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...