2.21.2007
I think that this week has been just as challenging in homework as the others have been, I am trying to finish up/work on two papers, and it probably was not smart on my part to take two English classes, especially when they both involve writing papers. It is hard to write two different papers at the same time, and keep your mind separate on each of them, but I should get through it!
The first story I read was “The Garden of Forking Paths”, and wow, was that ever a bad story for me to start the week off with. I was so confused I had no idea what was going on! A story really needs to have a good attention grabber to grab my attention and this one really lacked that. I think that it is because it started on the second page of a document, so maybe the exciting beginning was in that part. One thing I was not sure about this piece was why the main character of this story was on the bus and the journey to this place to begin with. Was it just to find out about his relative/ancestor?
I was so much more pleased by “Everything that Rises Must Converge”. This story was so much more straightforward and understanding that I was actually enjoying reading it. My favorite part was when Julian’s mother kept bragging about her grandpa who owned a plantation and was the governor and had 200 slaves, and then Julian turns around and starts telling his mom that it really was not that big of a deal, the plantation is over run by black people anyways! I guess I just took it as a sort of dry humor, but added that kick to the book, I really enjoyed it, even though the ending always seem to be bad and depressing with Flannery O’Connor’s pieces.
2 comments:
Jessica,
I thought that "The Garden of Forking Paths" was also very confusing. I really wondered how Berlin knew to look in the obituary section of the newspaper on that particular day only to find Stephen Albert's name and then know that his death was meant for Berlin! I can't decide if that is fate or just pure coincidence.
Hi, Jessica:
Flannery's stories do have "bad endings," but I have also found that in many of them, the bad ending brings at least one person in the story to a point at which he or she can turn around and experience a significant change of soul.
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