ENCW 101 Spring 2019

In the short story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,” Amy Hempel explores the last moments with a loved one who is dying. Indeed, the narrator is visiting her best friend at the hospital while she is sick and about to die. We understand that she comes late to visit her and that she has been here for a while thanks to the interactions with the doctors, for example.

The first person narration helps to engage the reader with the main character and to provide insight about what is going on during this visit. It also allows the reader to have access to the memories that the narrator is recollecting during this visit with, for example, the memories of the time they were in college together in the same dorm. We can also notice the switch between past and present tense throughout the story. It is confusing, but it shows how this process affects everything and especially time.

Indeed, in this story, Amy Hempel writes of the end of a life that puts an end to a relationship. By writing these exchanges between the two best friends that are inoffensive and humorous, it creates a gap between this banter and the actual tragic situation of the death of this girl. This kind of contrast is also present in the personalities of the two characters: one is fearless; the other is fearful. One knows everything, or so it seems, and the other is full of questions. It also shows that the one who is dying doesn’t have the same access to the real world and create a feeling that her disease and the idea that she is mortal allows her not to be afraid of doing crazy things because she is aware that she is going to die. The narrator represents the fact that by being in contact and by living in the world, we develop fears that prevent us from doing anything if it is really intense. This underlying question is deep and questions the way we live or take things for granted because we don’t realize that some people crave doing anything but being sick or away from the actual world.

In Tobias Wolff’s “The Night in Question,” we gain a close look at the bonds formed in terrible circumstances and how they effect different characters’ lives. The story follows Frances when she goes to visit her younger brother Frank and delves into how their abusive childhood has shaped the course of their lives.

The story begins with Frances coming over to help her brother through a heartbreak, but she arrives to find he isn’t really torn up over the issue. Already, this sets up the relationship between the siblings, with Frances rushing to help Frank at every obstacle. Later, we find out just how far Frances has gone to help him, nearly destroying her marriage in the process and never saying no to any of her brother’s whims. This fact doesn’t go unnoticed by the main character either, as she is keenly aware of how her brother exploits this trait of hers. He does so within the first few paragraphs as well, getting her to stay and listen to a rather dark sermon Frank had heard that afternoon. Before he can begin, though, we get a taste of the destructive path he has been on- crashing his sister’s car on a highway and nearly dying from a seizure during detox of what we later find out to be alcohol.

Frank begins to tell the tale of a railroad man named Mike Bolling and his son Benny. He continues on to reveal a normal, happy family backstory for these characters, all the while Frances informs of the contrasting childhood they experienced. We learn of her father’s abuse of Frank and eventually of Frances, consisting of food deprivation and physical encounters. We learn of their mother’s death as well, most likely from heart related issues, and how she, quite literally, closed her eyes to her husband’s treatment of Frank. During this, Frances even thinks of how their lives might have been different had their mother only intervened, then continues on to explain how they played out instead. She reveals how she stepped up for her brother, fighting her own father for him, and how she became his protector, a title that took up her life.

Frank then implies how the sermon ended, as Mike’s boy had wandered to the engine room, leaving his father to choose between the boy and a train full of people. He goes into a specific biblical saying that many recovering addicts and those who have faced hard things in life cling to- God gives you only what you can handle, and does not ask you to do what you can’t do. At this, we see the opposing viewpoints of two people dealing with the same memories of childhood abuse. Frances denies it entirely, believing that one life, the life of a loved one, shouldn’t be sacrificed for the greater, and asked her brother to make the same choice- figuratively- that Mike made. Frank says that is isn’t a choice he’d have to make, in a way revealing he would choose his sister, and sticking to his religious guns. Frances refuses to let him get away with this answer and prepares to fight, just like she had been doing all her life.

In the end, the story is about choices. Frank and Frances’ mother’s choice to stay blind to it all and the abandonment they faced from her, their father’s choice to abuse them and leave them with lasting scars, Frank’s choice to shift the reason for everything that happened to him onto God, Frances’ choice to protect her brother no matter what, and Mike’s choice to let his boy die for the train full of people. It studies the lasting impact these choices have on those directly and indirectly touched by their effects. And it leaves off with a sister’s determination to make sure her brother is never alone in facing down those effects again.

“In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” by Amy Hempel is a heartbreaking story that deals with guilt and grief and loss. This was the first story we’ve read that made me cry.  

We never learn the main character’s name; to us, she is the “Best Friend” of her dying friend, who is also not named.  She visits her friend in the hospital as she is losing the battle with what is implied to be cancer, and keeps her company by telling her interesting and sometimes gruesome trivia and stories about death and natural disasters.  The Best Friend seems both fascinated with and repulsed by death. Again and again, she tells stories about impending doom and unpredictable deaths, foreshadowing her friend’s fate and her own emotional devastation. Watching movies with her friend one night, though her friend is alive in the bed next to her, she says,

“I missed her already.”  

The Best Friend seems to know that she can’t be there to see her friend die.  When her friend’s health starts to decline, she tells her friend that she has to go home.  She knows she’s abandoning her friend when she needs support the most, but that doesn’t stop her from leaving.  It only makes her feel guilty and happy that she can go out and feel alive while her friend lays dying in the hospital:

“‘I have to go home,’ I said when she woke up.  She thought I meant home to her house in the canyon, and I had to say No, home home.  I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain.  I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.  I felt weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated.”

Her friend never expressed any fear of her impending death.  The Best Friend said that “she was afraid of nothing, not even flying.”  On the day her friend is buried, the Best Friend signs up for a Fear of Flying class and tells the instructor that her greatest fear is that, at the end of the class, she’ll still be afraid.  This loops back poetically to one of the first little stories the Best Friend tells about death, where she explains why she didn’t visit her friend sooner. The story goes that a man lost his arm in a car accident and died, but what killed him was the fear he felt just looking at his injury, not the injury itself.  The Best Friend is the same with her dying friend: she fears that she will never get over the loss of someone so dear. She avoided visiting her friend, and, at the end, didn’t even go to her funeral for the fear of the feelings she knows she’d be forced to deal with.

The Best Friend is a complex character, as her actions can be seen as both selfish and self-preserving.  She wasn’t there for her friend, but in a sense, she couldn’t be due to her own mental state. She doesn’t deal with the trauma of losing her friend, and clings to trivia as a way to not think about what happened. In a heartbreaking scene, she refers to the cemetery where her friend is put to rest as simply “the one where Al Jolson is buried.”

“Are These Actual Miles?” is a short story written in the third person about a man and a woman trying to sell a car. The man, Leo, “sends” the woman, Toni, out on a date to see if her charm and good looks could hook a buyer for their automobile. Leo downed drink after drink and agonized over how Toni handled the transaction.  He appeared less concerned about her safety on the date. Through a series of phone calls with Toni and even the restaurant she is stationed at Leo came to believe she has made the sale. Soon after, Leo discovered the plan encountered some casualties, with Toni left in a shameful state and the couple’s pocket book in, some would say, an even more displeasing position. Through repetition in the story, it became very clear that Leo, at all costs wanted to avoid bankruptcy. He even exclaimed, “he would rather be classified a robber or a rapist than bankrupt.” Toward the beginning of the story Leo promised Toni, “things are going to be different…we will start over Monday.” In other words he would no longer put the two of them in stressful, uncomfortable situations for the sake of making money. Then, near the end of the story, Leo arranged a meeting for that same Monday he said things would change, for the sake of money, which, once again, could put Toni and himself in an undesirable situation. I believe this story highlights the tight hold that the potential of wealth has on Leo and how he is unwilling to sacrifice this potential, even for the health and wellbeing of himself and those he claims to care for.

In “Burning Bright,” Ron Rash gives subtle signs about the relationship between Marcie and Carl that are a delight to unravel and see throughout the story. Ron Rash is excellent at paying close attention to detail through this story and makes sure we have enough information to follow what is happening. Rash shows this relationship between Marcie and Arthur near the end of the story, revealing that she has been married before and has children with this man, and that the kids favored Arthur over Marcie, which hurts her deeply. Marcie and Carl’s love story isn’t something grand or spectacular, but it was enough for Marcie, which shows she’s a very simple woman who can handle a very simple man. Carl has some roots that he doesn’t want to build up, which leads to him being very quiet and to himself. He started the wild fires and that makes sense because we learn that he has had a past of setting off fires and that’s the only bad thing he’s ever done on the police record. Marcie doesn’t want any trouble or for him to be under any stress, so she lies about when he got home to the police to protect him from being blamed for the fires. I feel Marcie doesn’t continue to push him to have more personality because she’s okay with a simple plain life.

Everyone dances around the fact Aruther died and she has started to date her handyman Carl, but is very direct in what she should do and shouldn’t do especially in the house of the lord. She hired Carl out of pity because her preacher said he was a good guy, but I do believe theres more to that. She says later on that

“The thought came to her then, like something held underwater that had finally slipped free and surfaced. The only reason you’ve been thinking it could be him, Marcie told herself, is because people have made you believe you don’t deserve him, don’t deserve a little bit of happiness.”

Marcie and Carl’s relationship is made difficult because of the age difference, that we see later on in the story,but that never gets in the way of problems in the relationship. But you can definitely tell that Carl and Aruther were very different men, Ron Rash makes that quite clear. Marcie stopped going to church and stopped praying but at the end of the story she says

“She shut her eyes closed tighter trying to open a space inside herself that might offer up all of what she feared and hoped for and brought forth with such fervor it could not help but be heard she prayed for rain.”

I feel she is content in her relationship but she wants more in life, thinking that the rain for Marcie symbolizes noise, a distraction, a emotion or feeling that has not been displayed due to the blandness of Carl and the lively hood of Aruther.

Humans are social creatures and long for connection with others. This fact is examined closely in Ron Rash’s “Burning Bright,” a short story about a woman named Marcie who lives in a small town dealing with drought and arsonist fires.

The story follows Marcie around as she runs errands, cares for her home, and thinks of her new and younger husband, Carl. At the beginning, Marcie is home alone and watching the news. As she drives to the grocery store, she thinks about the unwelcoming Floridians and also goes along the road identifying each of her neighbors by name. When she arrives at the store, she speaks with Barbara, a gossipy woman who alienates Marcie with her conversation. Rash uses all of these instances to establish resonance and atmosphere in the story early on. He sets Marcie in a very isolated, lonely place. The only person to speak to Marcie is the town gossip, who makes her think of how her daughters don’t speak with her and tries to instigate drama between her and Carl by making her jealous. Even the scenery is remote, with Marcie’s home being a half-mile away from anyone else’s and making that seem excruciating with the drought and dust, almost reminding the reader of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Lastly, Rash uses third-person-limited point of view to even further distance the reader from Marcie, truly solidifying how lonely this woman is.

Weaving in-between these scenes of solitude with Marcie is the memories she has of both of her husbands. Arthur, who we find out died, is the catalyst for Marcie’s loneliness while Carl, her new and younger husband, is the remedy for it. We are shown how Marcie perceives that the community abandoned her, only doing things such as chopping wood and checking on her seemingly out of respect for her late husband. During this time, Marcie buys several locks, as if to protect herself from being hurt again and also to resign herself to the fate of living alone for the rest of her life. It is here that Carl enters the picture and Marcie finds herself drawn to him. Unlike her, Carl is at home in his solitude, something she is desperate for. The community doesn’t like their relationship. and it pushes Marcie further away from them, most likely because he soothes her loneliness while the others abandoned her.

This carries over to the conclusion of the story, where the fires are linked to Carl through a hiker spotting a black pickup fleeing the scene. The sheriff comes by to ask where Carl is, and despite her own doubts earlier in the story, she covers for him. That night, after making love with her husband, Marcie prays for rain, because she would rather have him there with her than be alone once again.

A main theme of Ron Rash’s “Chemistry” is the exploration of the dichotomy between modern science and the mysticism of religion.  The story, which follows the aftermath of a man’s institutionalization for depression and subsequent release, is told through the eyes of the man’s son, Joel.  Joel’s father is given pills to take to treat what the reader later finds out is depression, but he refuses to take them. Ironically, Joel’s father is a high school chemistry teacher, a person who should understand that taking medication for depression is an important step in many people’s recovery.  This irony is present throughout the story, first noted by the doctor who treated Joel’s father:

“‘All he needs is a hobby,’ Dr. Morris said, patting my father’s back as if they were old friends, ‘to keep his mind off his mind.’  The doctor laughed and straightened his tie, added as if an afterthought, ‘and the medicine, of course.’ Dr. Morris patted my father’s back again. ‘A chemistry teacher knows how important that is.’”

Throughout the story, Joel watches his father struggle between understanding depression through science, as nothing more than a chemical imbalance that can be rectified with pills and lifestyle change, and through the lens of Pentecostalism.  Joel follows his father to a mid-week church service, and sees him rise to be “healed” by the congregation, speak in tongues, and snake-handle. Afterwards, Joel’s father explains his behavior by saying,

“There was a time I could understand everything from a single atom to the whole universe with a blackboard and a piece of chalk, and it was beautiful as any hymn the way it all came together… What I’m trying to say is that some solutions aren’t crystal clear.  Sometimes you have to search for them in places where only the heart can go.”

The message is tender but ironic, and reveals just how much Joel’s father was affected by his depression for it to have made him change his whole way of viewing the world.  Another layer of irony in this story is that, for most people, tragedy makes them turn the other way and become less religious, not more.

Joel’s father dies while scuba diving.  The coroner says it was caused by nitrogen narcosis, which induces delirium and is why Joel’s father removed his scuba mask while still underwater.  However, Joel’s father was struggling to breathe long before his final dive, illustrated by a poetic scene that describes what led to Joel’s father’s institution:

“In March Mr. Keller, the vice principal, had found my father crouched and sobbing in the chemical storage room, a molecular model of oxygen clutched in his hands…”

The tense switches to the present as Joel describes how he sometimes goes down to the lake house and looks at the water where his father drowned.  Though he says that the “coroner is probably right,” it’s easy for him to “imagine that [his] father pulling off the mask was something more,” as the darkness—both literal and metaphorical, as his father told him he was likely going to have the same struggle with depression—settles around him.

The story “Everything in this Country Must” is set in Nothern Ireland during the English occupation. We follow the story through Katie’s point of view, who is in the river with her father trying to save their horse from drowning. Then the soldiers arrive and we understand that they are patrolling and decide to help them save the horse. The first-person reflective — the story is told after the events by Katie when she realizes that her father killed the horse — gives an interesting insight. Indeed, the two main characters or at least the ones who are related are Irish, and yet we have a pretty positive feeling towards the English soldiers — first, because they help and it gives an epic scene, and then because Katie seems to be quite admiring of the soldiers, and especially Stevie. It is interesting to note that he is the only character who is named by his first name except Katie’s dead brother, which suggests that she feels a sort of intimacy. Also, the story is told by Katie not a long time after it happened, and we can see that she doesn’t understand what is going on clearly because she is young and doesn’t contextualize everything and is probably not involved in politics. For example, the author makes an unexplicit link between the death of her mother and brother and the soldiers, but she is not able to see this link and to realize that the British killed her loved ones. Finally, during the scene of the river but also during the scene at Katie’s house, we don’t hear the soldiers screaming and their conversations or the way they talk to her father. The perception is blurry because she is shocked and not able to analyze everything, which prevents us from having hard feelings towards the soldiers and makes the father appear as the “bad person.” We only realize at the end of the story the defiance from the father towards the soldiers when it becomes clearer that they are not here to do good things and when the father, in a last act of resistance, decides to kill the horse the soldiers saved even if it is his favorite one and it breaks his heart. This story shows one of the dark sides of English history in a very subtle way.

“Everything in This Country Must” is a short story written by Colum McCann. The story is told through the eyes of a woman named Katie reflecting on a past event that occurred when she was fifteen. It begins with Katie helping her father trying to save the family draft horse from a flood. She tells of her father wanting her to just let the horse drown instead of receiving help from the soldiers:

Drop the rope, girl, but I didn’t. I kept it tight holding the draft horse’s neck above the water, and all the time Father was saying but not saying, Drop it, please, Katie, drop it, let her drown.

Her father admits to not wanting help but receives it from the soldiers anyway; he would rather allow his horse to die than receive help from them. Katie tells of how her father saw the horse when being saved:

His eyes were steady looking at the river, maybe seeing Mammy and Fiachra in each eye of the draft horse, staring back.

He feels for the horse almost as much as he did for Mammy and Fiachra, which is why he would allow the horse to be relieved by just allowing it to die. Which is why in the end, he spares the horse pain for her father to handle his own grief.

“Everything in This Country Must” is a coming of age story, about a fifteen year old girl. In the story this young lady and her father tried to save their beloved draft horse from drowning. In the heat of their trial, three men from the army showed up on the scene to offer help. That is when her father exclaimed, “drop it, please, Katie, drop it, let her drown!” Using the POV of first person reflective, the author invokes the concept of a fifteen year old girl not understanding, then coming to understand, why her father would rather let their beloved horse drown than accepting help from willing, able young army men. At the end of the story the girl realized her father had extreme hatred for soldiers because they had killed his wife and son. Her father’s hatred ran so deep that he would not want to keep something that he loved dearly purely for the fact that soldiers preserved it for him. The last sentence in the story read, “What a small sky for so much rain.” It pointed to the fact that just one life can have so many complexities.

In “Talking Dog” the narrator’s sister deals with death by speaking to animals.

My sister told our family this when she came back to the dinner table from which my mother and I had watched her kneeling in the snowy garden, crouched beside the large shaggy white dog, her ear against its mouth.”

After that it was just a matter of time till she met the dog with a message. And we all knew who it was that my sister was waiting to hear from. Her boyfriend, Jimmy Kowalchuk,  had just been killed in Vietnam.”

It’s really interesting how the author gives the character this strange coping mechanism. The author uses a lot of detail to describe Jimmy, and it seems that his strange obsession with testing his limits is what makes the sister so drawn to him. It also seems to be what makes the narrator herself so drawn to him. It could also be the way that he makes them feel safe and taken care of, as they, it appears, didn’t feel before him and won’t feel after him.

When Jimmy dies, the girls are both hurt and deeply affected. The sister talks to dogs and distances herself from everyone, while the narrator keeps her grieving and hurt to herself. When the father dies, nothing really changes for any of the characters except the sister, who gets married. The death of the sister reveals that she blames herself for her father even getting sick.

No matter how much my father told us about his disease, my sister believed that somehow she had caused it, and she had this pet iguana that was the only one she could tell.”

This story really shows how grieving varies depending on the person and how death can make people change and do things that they never thought they would.

Robert Olen Butler’s “Mr. Green” tackles many issues between families of different religions and cultures. While the ethnicity of the whole family is Vietnamese, the old generation, specifically the grandfather, subscribes to Confucianism and the younger generation is Catholic. This puts the female narrator in the middle of a horrible battle between her parents and grandparents, both sides wanting to do right by the child but also wanting her to follow their religious beliefs.

One part of following the way of Confucius is honoring your ancestors. The grandfather follows this with a small, private shine for his late father. In order to show the shrine to the young girl, he sets up the facade that they’re going to see his parrot, Mr. Green, to keep it from her father. He explains the how and why of the shrine and, by the end, the girl is very excited by this practice, even saying she will keep a shrine for him when he passes. The grandfather’s response is heartbreaking. He says that it’s “not possible. […] only a son can oversee the worship of his ancestors.”

Every little girl gets told she can’t do something because she’s not a boy, from silly things like sports to things as important as religious practices. We grow up thinking we’re not enough struggling with knowing that we are missing out on many things, sometimes things like unconditional love from our families, because of our gender. Throughout the story, this poor young girl is reminded of that from someone she loves. The grandfather’s disappointment is clear in the shrine room and on his death bed; it even comes through in the form of Mr. Green. Even after his death, the narrator has to suffer, thanks to her grandfather’s voice echoing through a bird. The animal taunts her, and the memories haunt her daily, doing her best with what life has given her and trying to enjoy it. Eventually, she has had enough and sacrifices the parrot for her own good.

The obvious comparison is that the shrine and the bird represent the same thing, honoring one’s ancestors in some way. Throughout the story, you can see how much distress this causes her, knowing the bird is not good for her but wanting to keep him as he is the last part of her grandfather. When she snaps all that, distress immediately turns into confidence. Saying goodbye to Mr. Green is letting the grandfather go but also letting go of the insecurities caused by the misogyny she lived around since childhood. The narrator is able to appreciate her life more, not feeling like she is second best anymore. Finally, she is comfortable being a woman.

Carrie Brown’s “Miniature Man” has some parts in the story that are great moments. She has a way of explaining the main characters like Gregorio and Dr. Xavia that I throughly enjoyed. I enjoyed seeing the relationships that already exist and felt like I had a connection to each of the characters. I was impressed with the way Carrie Brown talked about Gregorio losing both of his hands and how his mother and father got into arguments about how they have different ways about caring for their son. The way she interpreted the doctor’s viewpoint throughout and seeing how other people react and her reaction to them is interesting. I enjoyed seeing the development of the characters grow like Gregorio using his mouth instead of his hands that were out of commission and how the different characters reacted. How she describes the setting made me feel as if I was personally there walking the streets and looking at the beautiful tall trees over the buildings and climbing up the mountains.

In “Mr. Green” religion was a problematic thing. It caused a sort of rift between the main character’s parents and her grandfather. Her grandfather was strongly against her mother’s Catholicism, and he tried to change his granddaughter’s views. The fact that he went behind his daughters back to try and carry his belief onto his granddaughter showed just how strong his own belief was.

Your father is doing a terrible thing. If he must be Catholic, that’s one thing. But he has left the spirits of his ancestors to wander for eternity in loneliness.”

The grandfather attempts to change his granddaughter’s perspective, and when the granddaughter wants to help her grandfather and honor him when he’s gone, he shuts her down because she is a girl. Her eagerness to help her grandfather suddenly turns to tears.

‘You are a girl’ he said. ‘So it’s not possible for you to do it alone. Only a son can oversee the worship of his ancestors.’”

The descriptive voice of the author really helps to paint the picture of the story; you can really feel what is happening when it is happening. That helped me really place myself in the story and connect to it.

In “Miniature Man,” Carrie Brown writes the story of Gregorio, a young man who lives in Spain and who is dedicated to the creation of his own museum. The story is kind of long for a short story but is detailed and complex. There are multiple characters, and they are all characterized very differently: Carlos for being a little bit hard to approach, Celeste for being an attentive woman, the narrator for being the doctor of the family but also the person from whom the others ask advice, and Gregorio for being the main character who remains mysterious until the very end.

It is interesting to see the point of view as it is a third person but for once it is through another character present in the story that we see the actions and that we get to discover another character. Also, the descriptions are almost constantly present but not suffocating. Instead of understanding the story throughout statements and narrative sentences, we learn a lot through descriptions and especially of the movements. This text is focused on the senses: we see Gregorio’s hand; we feel the movements of the hands of Carlos and Celeste in the final scene; we hear the sounds of the voices in the video.

The most interesting part to me was the fact that thanks to this writing that is sensual, we get to feel the passion of Gregorio even without knowing, for most of the story, what is inside of his museum. We understand what he sacrificed for that — the scene of his hands on the glass at the beginning is explicit — and then through the descriptions and also through the cautious attitude of the narrator towards him, we understand the importance this passion has in his life.

The first sentence of “Mr. Green” serves to establish some of the protagonist’s background, as do the majority of first sentences in literature. Right away, it tells us that she follows the religion of her parents, but that her parents are a recent deviation from their ancestors’ traditions. While it can be argued that the statement “I do not believe in the worship of my ancestors” is something that could be meant literally, in line with the customs her grandfather teachers her as a child, I interpreted it as her not following her ancestors’ religion. (Of course, both interpretations can be true.) Later in the story, we learn that she does, in fact, pray for her grandfather, which could mean that she either is lying in the first sentence or that her prayers are not done out of belief but out of some other force, such as an obligation to a promise.

The last sentence, or sentences, return to her Catholicism and give us somewhat a resolution to the misogyny she internalized after spending so much time listening to her grandfather’s sexism and assuming it was correct simply because he was older and wiser than anyone else she knew. It addresses that while her grandfather did not believe that women can lead prayers, she was all he had so he better suck it up and accept them.

“Mr.Green” by Robert Olen Buttler has a lot of detailed description that beautifully illustrates his purpose about how people have moral influences. The story’s theme explores the patriarchal influence on the narrator’s (a little girl’s ) sense of self through the use of the grandfather’s perspective on a woman’s role in a family (society).

    ” My grandfather explained about the spirit world, how the souls of our ancestors continued to need love and attention and devotion. Given these things, they will share in our life and they will bless us and even warn us about disasters in our dreams. But if we neglect the souls of our ancestors, they will become lost and lonely and will wander in the kingdom of the dead no better off than a warrior killed by his enemy and left unburied in a rice paddy to be eaten by blackbirds of pray.”

Butler uses a lot of descriptive languages to give examples of how the grandfather in the story believes a lot of moral influences and why they should live by them. This example really has one thinking about how someone can live by certain beliefs and leaves them thinking what would life be if they didn’t think like that.

When Carrie Brown wrote the first sentence of “Miniature Man,” she included many details of the story in which readers soon become engrossed.

“For fifteen years, Gregorio Aruña worked among us, building his museum of miniatures here in our village of Monterojo, high in the Sierras de las Marinas, and in all that time, no one was allowed in the door of his museum.” (27)

From just this first sentence, readers learn the setting and main focus of the story. The story is set in a small village in Spain and is mainly about the character Gregorio Aruña. Gregorio Aruña spent fifteen years in a small house creating a scaled-down replica of his village.

When he had almost completed the model village, Gregorio suffered a major injury to his hands and visits the village doctor, Dr. Tomas Xavia, later described as his first cousin once removed. This short story is from Dr. Xavia’s first-person point of view.

Carrie Brown’s short story closes by describing Gregorio and his work.

“And on the wall behind them, the tiny man at the worktable, fashioned out of clay, remained bent over his task, intent only on the work before him.” (64)

Throughout the story, his parents and neighbors doubt Gregorio’s work will amount to much. When Dr. Xavia and Patrick, Gregorio’s nephew, video record and show the inside of the museum to Carlos and Celeste, they clap and seem proud of their son. This shows that the characters, while seemingly static, are dynamic.

One of the most beautiful elements of “Mr. Green” by Robert Olen Butler is the many instances of detailed description, where Butler was able to perfectly capture a feeling or scene using figurative language.  For example, Butler wrote,

“I felt a strange thing inside me, a recoiling, like I’d stepped barefoot on a slug, but how can you recoil from your own body?”

It wasn’t enough to just write about how heart-wrenching it must have been, to have your grandfather tell you that his spirit is going to suffer a terrible afterlife, and that your prayers otherwise mean nothing because you’re a girl.  The reader could imagine, in a vague way, what the main character might have felt, but through that one beautiful little phrase, “like I’d stepped barefoot on a slug,” Butler put the reader right there with her, feeling that terrible feeling alongside her.   

Sometimes, in the spring, when I let my dogs out to our backyard before the sun has come up, I step barefoot on a slug.  It’s a gross feeling that part of you wants to overreact to; it makes you you want to scrape your foot against sandpaper, or perhaps plunge it in a bucket of boiling water to sterilize it.  But what you end up doing is wiping your foot off on the floor, letting your dogs back into the house, and forgetting the feeling entirely until you step barefoot on another slug.

Butler used this simile perfectly, because the main character reacts in much the same way: she cries, but, in the end, is too young to do anything about what her grandfather says about women.  She describes other memories of him tenderly, until, on his deathbed, he once more makes comments about women being stupid and foolish and she feels the stepped-barefoot-on-a-slug feeling again.

“‘Do you hear them talking?’ he said.  He nodded toward the door and he obviously meant my mother and grandmother.  

‘Yes,” I said. He frowned.

‘How foolish they sound. Chattering and yammering.  All the women sound like that. You don’t want to grow up sounding like all these foolish women, do you?’  

I did not know how to answer his question. I wanted very much to be like my mother, and when my grandfather said this, I felt the recoiling begin inside me and the tears begin to rise.”

His comments change the way she views him, but not to the point where she remembers him poorly.  She speaks of more memories of him tenderly, and seems to miss him, though certainly age has helped her realize the sexist nature of his comments.  This explains her treatment of Mr. Green towards the end of his life.

“Yours” by Mary Robison is a short story about a couple, Clark and Allison. Clark, seventy eight, and his wife Allison, thirty five, were a very close couple despite their significant age difference. They were both tall and looked similar to each other, but it seemed as though the area that they differed most was in their life’s experience. Throughout the story, the couple was fascinated with pumpkin carving. Clark’s pumpkins always looked much better than Allison’s less intricate, less precise carvings. The story referred to each of the characters in different ways: Clark was portrayed as wise and humble, whereas Allison often made adolescent decisions in her life. Each of them, although very different, gave greatly to their relationship. Toward the end of the story, Allison was dying and the reader was left with the image of Clark staring at the jack o’lanterns as they stared back at him.  Clark’s gaze could have had many connotations in this story but, in this instance, I believe it represents Clark seeing a reflection of himself and Allison in their carvings.

“Yours” is a short story written by Mary Robison about a 35-year-old named Allison and her husband, Clark, who is 78; they live in Virginia. They spend their time together carving pumpkins. Clark compliments Allison on her carving skills, she doesn’t believe his compliment, telling Clark that his lantern will look the same once lit. Later that same night, Allison dies. After this occurs, Clark goes to watch the lanterns.

He watched the jack-o’-lanterns. The jack-o’-lanterns watched him.

This last sentence causes the reader to realize what Clark see’s when he looks at the jack-o’-lanterns. How the pumpkins are a work of art that Allison completed and how she is symbolized in the jack-o’-lantern.

The Lifeguard, by Mary Morris, was clearly written from the perspective of someone who knows all about teenage boys and girls. This work was a rather comical piece and kept me laughing. Yet, giving the piece a bittersweet touch, Morris skillfully mingled rather sobering moments in with the comedy. Morris set the scene on a beach called “Pirate’s Point” where a teenage heartthrob lifeguard patrolled the waters, living what he initially thought to be an awesome life. The lifeguard, Josh Michles, loved his summers as a lifeguard.  He “loved to walk the beach with a girl dangling from his bicep.” Girls would give him their undivided attention. They would bring him cokes, hotdogs and just about anything his heart desired. The only thing he did not like about his summer job was a particular woman. He felt that she constantly watched him. Her name was Mrs. Lovenheim. Josh felt as though “she never spoke unless she wanted something and she never got up until it was time for him to go home.” At first, most of this story appears to be some kind of teenage summer romance tale, until there is a drowning. Naturally, the tragedy was a heavy weight to bear for many of the characters in the story. The drowning was later followed by a near death experience when a girl named Becky (the daughter of Josh’s old babysitter who is very dear to him) nearly chokes to death. Despite his best efforts Josh did not know what to do to save this poor girl. After exclaiming, “he has done all he has been trained to do,” the surrounding spectators continued to pressure him. “This is your job, you are the lifeguard, save her!”, spectators exclaimed. As Josh could do no more, Mrs. Lovenheim swooped in and rescued the day. She performed the Heimlich maneuver on poor Becky, cleared her air passage and saved her life. A little while later, John felt as though he needed to thank Mrs. Lovenheim. He visited this woman’s house even though he used to be so opposed to her and he thanked her. He sobbed as she nurtured him in her arms. In that moment he realized he did not crave the touch and attention from all those young teenage girls, rather he needed to be nurtured and cared for by the genuine touch of Mrs. Lovenheim.  

In the short story “The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor,” Deborah Eisenberg writes from Francie’s point of view. This young college girl lives a regular life: she fights with her roommate; she goes to classes and smokes behind the buildings. Then one day, she discovers that her mother has died at the hospital.

The plot is not the most original one, but the story is interesting because it creates a kind of a loop. In the beginning, we follow the story of this young girl who has to deal with the disappearance of her mother, who is the only parent she ever knew. The author emphasizes the fact that young people are sometimes really harsh on their parents and don’t realize that they are also mortal. The description and the fact that the story is written from the main character’s point of view give the reader a lot of insights about the process of grieving at a young age. Then we explore a phase of wandering, and it shows how it is complicated to face the death of a parent but also how people can have a lack of sensitivity towards a dead’s loved ones.

Meanwhile, we follow the quest of Francie as she goes to New-York City to find her dad, who she had previously thought was dead. She met people along the way, and we get to read her fears but also her expectations and how she handles this journey. The fact that the character is comparing herself all the time to her mother is striking and puts the reader into the process of grieving but also remembering a parent not only for his/her qualities. The story ends with Francie who is waiting for her father to come back to his home; she is in the hall and the prose is not too filled with pathos; it sounds realistic and we understand that this marks the new beginning of something else. The rhythm, for instance, changes in the last paragraph: the sentences are shorter with just one proposition, and it creates this effect of being short of breath.

The death of her mother is finally not an end but the beginning of the main character’s journey, and the meeting with her father is not a beginning but the end of her wandering phase.

In “The Lifeguard” by Mary Morris, we learn about a pivotal moment for a lifeguard at Pirate Point Beach named Josh Michaels through his own point of view but many years after the date of the incident. In his youth Josh sees himself as young and desirable, and he sees himself as the best — but in reality, he was stuck. Josh, though, wasn’t the only person who was stuck in some way or another; in fact, everyone around him seemed equally as stuck. Readers are introduced to several characters by name including Ric, Billy, Peggy, and Mrs. Lovenheim. Ric is a previous lifeguard who trained Josh; he is stuck in his past as a lifeguard, which is why he visits Josh at the beach every day. Billy is a boy who drowned in the ocean, leaving his family stuck in the past when he was around and leaving the obsessive thought in Josh’s mind of a boy being swept into the ocean. Peggy is the sister of Billy; Josh asks her on a date to the movie theater to find out what Billy was like pre-death and what it was like once he died, which makes Peggy want to leave. Peggy is stuck in the past also, which is why she doesn’t know how to handle being asked about the past because she still mentally lives there and hasn’t moved on. Mrs. Lovenheim is the one who saves a girl from drowning but also saves Josh from turning into Ric. Had she not been there, he would’ve felt at fault for the girl dying and been stuck at Pirate Point with the same outlook, just watching the waves.

In “The Lifeguard,” Mary Morris writes in past tense from the perspective of an older man, Josh Michaels, who details the year he was head lifeguard at his local beach.  One of the main elements of the story is the dichotomy of past and present, shown in where each of the characters seems to focus. Interestingly, though, Josh describes himself as being unaffected by the passage of time at that point in his life, saying,

“I had seen Ric Spencer, who had ruled this beach before me for half a decade, lose his hair, and I’d seen the slim bodies of women stretch with childbearing.  I’d seen it all and it had not impressed me, but rather it flowed through me like a river, not stopping here.”

Most of the characters that surround Josh are trapped in the past in different ways.  One example is Ric Spencer, the previous head lifeguard. Ric, who is now married with a daughter, spends most of his time with Josh instead of his family, finding the most pleasure not in watching his daughter play on the beach but in reliving his glory days.  Ric was the lifeguard on duty when a local boy named Billy Mandel drowned, the only recorded drowning to take place at that beach. Ric retells the story of the drowning over and over, embellishing it until it’s about his own heroism and not the tragedy of the drowning.  Ric’s obsession with the past is evidenced in his jealousy of Josh and longing for the days when he used to be like Josh. He continuously makes remarks aimed at making Josh understand that these days of youth and beauty won’t last, saying,

“[Ric] was only twenty-six that summer when I became head lifeguard, but he used to say, as bronzed girls handed me Cokes or asked if I needed more oil on my back, ‘Man, you don’t know what it is.  You don’t know what you’ve got.’”

Also on the beach is the Mandel family, including Peggy, Billy’s younger sister.  The entire Mandel family is trapped in the past as well, traumatized by Billy’s drowning.  Peggy is trapped by her overprotective parents, as well as by Josh, who takes her on a date only to ask her what Billy was like.  Peggy’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mandel, are trapped by their own doing: both are so afraid of Peggy drowning that, when they take her to the beach they spend their time being paranoid that something will happen instead of enjoying the day with their daughter.

“Peggy, who was a sophomore and known to be fast, used to shout at her parents, who sat motionless, reading endless newspapers unless Peggy went for a swim.  And then Mr. Mandel would stand in his sneakers, waves lapping at his feet, as if somehow, through his attentiveness, he could bring back what was gone.”

Only one character is fully in the present: Mrs. Lovenheim.  Other characters seem washed out and aged, but descriptions of her character paint her as someone unfading.  When Ric talks about how she was when she was young, Josh thinks that he

“… couldn’t imagine that anyone could have known her ‘when,’ whenever that was.”

Though to the characters Mrs. Lovenheim appears to be just as trapped in the past as they are—stuck on the man who dumped her, her routine never changes; each day when she pulls out her book on the beach, she flips to the same page as though she’s frozen in time—she actually spends her beach days watching Josh.  Josh, youthful and admired, seems to represent the present. Though other characters interact with Josh in different ways, most do so only because they want something from him: Ric wants to relive his time as a lifeguard and the girls want to date him. Mrs. Lovenheim, though, is actually paying attention to Josh, which is why she’s the one who saves little Becky from choking on the grape.  She’s the only one who is paying attention to what’s happening now.  

Later, when Josh shows up at her door, she explains that she’d taken classes, and that’s how she knew what to do when Becky was choking.  This is the only evidence of any character in the story changing; Josh, Ric, and the Mendels are flat and static in their own ways, but by taking classes, Mrs. Lovenheim exhibits character development.  She’s moved on from the past in order to be fully in the present.  In a way, Josh recognizes this, and wants to be with her because he knows that soon he will become as washed-out as Ric and the others.

In an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.

The first day of school is always nervewracking for anyone. Will you make friends? Are the teachers kind or mean? How difficult will the work be? All common questions running through the mind of a young child. Yet nothing can compare to the occurrence described in “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones. The scenes are laid out in vivid imagery, allowing readers to almost insert themselves into the story being told. The narrator is recalling her first day of school as a little girl. Her mother is doing everything she can to be sure her daughter looks nice for this very important step toward the rest of her life. After being turned away from Seaton, the school across from their church, they arrive at Walker-Jones. This is where the narrator’s life is changed, although in a very unfortunate way.

“Would you help me with this form? That is, if you don’t mind.”

The woman asks my mother what she means.

“This form. Would you mind helpin me fill it out?”

The woman still seems not to understand.

“I can’t read it. I don’t know how to read or write, and I’m askin you to help me.” My mother looks at me, then looks away. I know almost all of her looks, but this one is brand new to me.

The moment a child starts seeing their mother differently is the moment the relationship is forever changed. The mother/daughter bond is evidently strong, but this one event — and when her mother leaves her to begin her education — has stuck with her through the years.

And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.