Concise Critique

On Wednesday this week we discussed "Aurora" and whether or not we can call it a love story. Lucero and Aurora have a complicated, troublesome, unhealthy ... (insert negative adjective) relationship, making it hard to call "Aurora" anything other than an account of two young adults in a peculiar and unfortunate situation. Despite this, Lucero claims that they are in love , which as a reader sounds like bullshit, as Cut would say. Whether Lucero and Aurora are in love or not, they're in a relationship. A relationship where, I believe, Lucero thinks about and needs Aurora more than she thinks about or needs him.  They both physically attack each other, with Lucero doing the most damage between the two. However he seems to be the one who's continually chasing after her, looking for her, looking out for her, and thinking about her. This is not uncommon with relationships involving domestic abuse, and Lucero seems to fit perfectly into the role of a man who fe...

In "How to Be an Other Woman" from  Self-Help , we saw (are took the role of) a woman enter a relationship with a married man, and learned how to deal with being in this situation. In this story, the narrator directs the  you  to go on a number of dates, to be discreet and careful, to refrain from asking too many questions about his wife, and to try to adopt the qualities that the man likes in his wife. The character that is being directed in this story is a young, healthy, somewhat nerdy woman who works in a disappointing job. She seems unsatisfied with her status before the relationship, and once the affair begins, she feels increasingly uncomfortable with her position. "How" features another young, healthy (and maybe a bit nerdy too) young woman who finds herself stuck in a relationship that is increasingly aggravating to her, mostly because she's grown bored of her partner, but also because it never becomes easy to leave him. Here, instead of the male char...

Disclaimer: Long post so beware When we were discussing "The Outing" in class, we were able to cover almost everything in the story except the church service they held on the boat. I thought it was one of the most interesting scenes in the story, and I also felt that, in some ways, I could relate to how Johnnie felt and the way the service was depicted by the narrator. This scene has the potential to be the most confusing scene in the story due to the amount of dialogue and the ambiguity of the narration when it appears. Some of the language reminds me of the jazz performance in "Sonny's Blues". For example, when Baldwin is describing the commotion of the service on the boat, he says, "And someone cried aloud, a timeless sound on wailing; fire splashed the open deck and filled the doors and bathed the sinners standing there; fire filled the great hall and splashed the faces of the saints and a wind, unearthly, moved above their heads. Their hands were a...

Seymour's strange behavior and sudden suicide are two of the most confusing aspects of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish". He seems fascinated with children, but also appears to be struggling with major personal issues that culminate in him taking his own life. His fascination and strife are never fully explained, and since reading the story, I've been looking through  Nine Stories  to see if I could discover any clues. Other stories have included relatives to Seymour, but none have fleshed out his condition. The most explicit reference to Seymour was in "Down at the Dinghy" where they actually mentioned his name, but by this point he was already dead. "Teddy" doesn't include any references to Seymour, but its position at the end of the anthology leads me to believe that it's meant to provide some context for the entire book. The nine stories don't follow any logical order, but if the book does follow any regular conventions, the end may ha...

Disclaimer: This is not a "concise critique" by any means, so if you're looking for a short read, this is not the blog post for you. In our discussion of Seymour in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" this week, several of us had an uncomfortable feeling reading Seymour's interaction with Sybil, the young girl he meets on the beach. The question of whether Seymour was a pedophile or a general "creep" arose, but we left it unanswered. Instead, we (somewhat) concluded that Seymour was more comfortable talking to children, and that his peculiar behavior came from a place of mental instability, not malicious or perverted intention. Furthermore, Mr. Mitchell added that throughout Salinger's stories, Seymour never has a hint of pedophilia or suspicious sexual activity. Even so, he did acknowledge the possibility that Seymour's actions were sexual, and he was aware that students have frequently raised the same questions in recent years. It...

Here's the original prompt that we were given in class:  Respond directly to O'Brien's questions for the reader near the end of the story: "You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do?" How would you answer this? What would you do? Had I been in O'Brien's shoes, I probably would have turned back and headed home, not because of a lack of courage, but because I would not be able to deal with the guilt of having not fought in the war when I had been asked. It certainly wouldn't come from a place of proud nationalism or extreme bravado, rather from the understanding that it would be hard, years later, to see other men who died or fought at my age while I was sitting up somewhere safe and unbothered in Canada. I would feel as if I had cheated life. I also wouldn't see leaving for Canada as an act of courage. Yes, it w...