Friday, May 11, 2018

Boori Ma: Truth or Lies?

After reading 'A Real Durwan,’ I’ve found Boori Ma to be one of the most interesting characters I’ve encountered this semester. Boori Ma is a refugee of the Partition of India in 1947, which was an event that had a huge impact on both the people involved as well as their descendants. In the story,...

Friday, April 27, 2018

Maskulinity

The theme of masculinity in Diaz's stories has been brought up in class a few times, and I found it very interesting to look at what role it plays in the story "Ysrael." One of the earliest events that stood out to me is when Yunior cries after being sexually harassed on the bus, and Rafa tells him...

Friday, April 6, 2018

How "How" Made Me Feel

The short story, "How" has become one of my favorite pieces I've read for this class so far. In a way, the style reminds me of "Pee on Water"—I feel as if I'm watching a time lapse or movie, completely engrossed in every scene and the emotion it holds. In addition, the two stories share the clear passage...

Friday, March 16, 2018

Paris

Baldwin's story "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" takes place in Paris, where the narrator, an American expatriate, and his family have lived for twelve years. They are on the verge of returning to the US for the narrator's work, and he is understandably nervous about the transition. For the...

Thursday, March 1, 2018

How Does Teddy Die?

(Sorry about the weird formatting) For me, the ending of Salinger's short story "Teddy" came across as an unexpected shock. Even if the reader had picked up on earlier hints dropped by Teddy, I don't think that many people fully expected the story to end in the way it did. But going off that, how does...

Friday, February 9, 2018

Phony People

Since we've started reading Salinger's short stories, I can't help but notice great similarities between them and Salinger's most known work, Catcher in the Rye. Some stories seem to bear an uncanny resemblance. Others not so much, but still carry over certain elements from Catcher. I think Uncle Wiggily...

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Beauty, Gore and Death

There's no denying that war is gory. It's ugly. It's dirty and often not as glorious as one might expect (take the shit field where Kiowa passed, for example). Indeed, "war is hell." But can it be beautiful as well? In the stories we've read so far from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, there have...