How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)

In the short story How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes) Lorrie Moore uses a unique style of story teller that engages the reader in a different way. Slowly, she takes the reader back in time through each year of her life, pointing out important things that happened and exploring how her mother affected her and how they interacted.

I felt, as the story progressed, that I was slowly being pulled back in time with her. As I slowly went back in time with the narrator, I was thinking about my own life and how it compared to hers. I was drawn further and further into the story until I reached the beginning of her life. This reverse linear story telling made more interested in the story than if it had just been the story of her life from beginning to end.

The other interesting thing that Moore did was telling the story as commandments to the Reader. It is literally a how-to guide of her life. I thought this made the story interesting and got the plot across while imploring the reader to step in her shoes. She talks about abortion, the death, sex, and how all of this is related to the relationship she had with her mother. At the beginning she is trying to cope with this loss and a takes the reader through everything that she experienced.

Job History

The structure of Annie Proulx's Job History does not follow the typical structure of a short story. There is no real rising action and definitive climax. Rather, the structure of the story mimics real life. It follows one man through the ups and downs of his life, pointing out significant moments and referencing various historical events.

I think that this story could not have been told any other way. The chronological structure of the story emphasizes the message of the story. As the reader watches Leeland journey through life, a lot of things come up that seem sort of irrelevant, but often we find out later that they are very important. For example, it seems sort of like just a fun fact that he feeds his baby beer to keep it quiet. Of course, when the child has convulsions and suffers brain damage that seems kind of important. (Don't feed your baby beer.)

Fiesta

Junot Diaz's short story Fiesta provides an insight into the life of a family who has been torn apart by the behavior of an abusive father. At different instances throughout the story, the narrator points out how each member of his family has been hurt by his father's antics. His mother is no longer happy and vibrant, but has become meek. Even his baby sister, cries whenever she hears the her father's voice.

I think that setting the story at a party was a very interesting choice. Even at a time when they should be celebrating and socializing with friends, Papi's affair is weighing heavily on the family. The party serves more as a reminder of what the family should be, as opposed to what they are.

Catastrophe

In his film version of Catastrophe, Pinter remained very loyal to Beckett's original script. There were only a few deviations. The first came when they assistant asked whether the protagonist's finger should be pointed. In the original, she suggests that his hands should be joined. Also, at the end there is not a roar of thunderous applause, just the sound of the assistant applauding.

I felt that the character of the assistant was the most different from the script to the video. In the film, she seemed authoritative and not timid or afraid to voice her opinions. Reading the play, I got the sense that the assistant was very meek and skittish. However, I didn't get that sense watching the video.

Born in the U.S.A.

In the song “Born in the U.S.A”, Bruce Springsteen criticizes the structure of society, war and the treatment of the working class. Far from the patriotic anthem that some believe it to be, this song tells the story of a boy who is forced into war and returns to find that there is nothing left for him in this country.

In the third stanza, he says “Sent me off to a foreign land/ To go and kill the yellow man”. This is a clear reference to the Vietnam War. Often in war, it is the lower classes that are forced to do the actual fighting because they have no other options. Especially in the Vietnam War when the draft was implemented, the rich were able to avoid it by going to school, but the poor had no choice but to go to war.

When many veterans got back from the war, they weren’t treated with a lot of respect and had trouble getting their lives together. The second to last stanza says, “Down in the shadow of the penitentiary/Out by the gas fire of the refinery/ I’m ten years burning down the road/ Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go”. The only options for the speaker of this poem were to work the rest of his life at a meaningless refinery job or to go to jail. This song was a blatant critique of how we perceive war and the opportunities of America. The title serves as an ironic reminder that even in the supposed land of limitless opportunities not everyone who is born in the United States is given the same chance to succeed.

Thursday, January 15th

The poem "Digging" by Robert Heaney draws a parallel between the work of a farmer and a poet. The speaker is a man watching his father shoveling in a potato field while he sits in his room to write. As he watches his father work, he contemplates his own work as a poet.

As the poem progresses, Heaney uses the pen the speaker is holding as an extended metaphor. He compares the pen to the shovel his father is using. In the last lines of the poem he says, "Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I'll dig with it." Just as his father and grandfather used a shovel to work in the fields, the speaker is using his pen to do work.

Furthermore, as he watches his father work, he uses images to convey the situation. In line 25, he says, "The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt curds of of an edge/Through living roots awaken in my head." This lines procure vivid images of mud and dirt, allowing the reader to see the situation clearly in their heads. Those lines also contain an onomatopoeia. The words "squelch and slap" sound like what they mean, making the image real for the listener.

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