Edgar Allan Poe- The Tell-Tale Heart and Stephen Crane- A Dark-Brown Dog

The Tell-Tale Heart

I remember watching an episode from The Simpsons about Lisa being in a diorama competition, and she sabotages another girl’s diorama of The Tell-Tale Heart by putting a real heart in.  I loved watching The Simpsons and after I saw the this episode, I went on a mission to my school’s library to find this story.  I first read The Tell-Tale Heart when I was about 10, and I didn't understand anything about it.  I liked how creepy the story was, but I didn’t understand what the story was all about.  This year, I read it again because I was looking at a list of the best short stories and Poe’s story was one of the first ones on the list. 

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843.  The story is about how the narrator is in love with an old man, but is terrified of his piercing blue eye.  The narrator has a disease that has sharpened all his senses profusely.  His hearing was the sense that was most affected by the disease.  The narrator hears almost everything.  The narrator goes to the old man’s room at 12am for seven days and each day shines a lantern to see the eye.  On the eighth day, the old man wakes up and hears the narrator at the door, so the narrator kills him. 

The Tell-Tale Heart is one of my favorites because I find it fascinating how none of the characters have names! There is the nameless narrator, the old man, and police officers. One of the things that I love is when stories recount a traumatic event because I get drawn into the story.  In The Tell-Tale Heart the narrator says, “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.  Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this.” By writing that second sentence, Poe creates an opportunity to interact with his audience and trying to persuade to them to believe that his character is not crazy.   The narrator is telling the readers the story about the man to convince them of his sanity.  The narrator didn't do a very good job at convincing me of his sanity.  I knew the moment I started reading the story that he was crazy. The narrator just gave off an incredibly creepy vibe.  

Suspense builds in the middle of the story which kept me engaged.  Here we learn about the days leading up to the eighth day.  Poe wants emphasize the eighth day as the turning point of the story.  By doing so, he is able to elaborate about the climax of the story.  The entire rest of the story is about day-eight which is where things get a wee bit more creepy. On the eighth day, the Old Man wakes up.  When the he wakes up, the narrator stays in the door way for an hour before slowly making an opening wide enough for the lantern and when it shines in, the beam of light lands perfectly on the old man’s eye.  What a coincidence right?  I felt like at some points Poe would hyperbolize some things to make the story more interesting, but back to the story.  When the light beams on the man’s eye, the narrator decides to kill the man.  He goes into the room and put his bed over him.  Poe completely lost me there.  I have no idea how the bed killed the old man but it did.  I am sure that by putting a bed over someone they would not die but I guess the narrator had no other tools to kill the man with.  After the old man dies, the narrator takes the floorboards out of the floor and puts the body underneath and covers it up.  Later, the police come because someone called in suspected foul play and they had to check.  The narrator has a conversation with the officers and during the conversation, the narrator hears a ringing and tries to get rid of it by talking louder.  The louder he talked, the louder the ringing got and he convinced himself that it was not ringing but the beating of the old mans heart. The story ends with the narrator confessing to the police officers and telling him about the beating heart.  IF THE OLD MAN IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, WHY CAN THE NARRATOR HEAR HIS BEATING HEART? I think that the narrator did not actually hear the dead guys heart beating but he was so consumed with guilt that he lead himself to believe that it was the old man’s hear beating.  

Aside from all the hyperbolizing in the story, I really enjoyed The Tell-Tale Heart.  I really enjoyed how the narrator is trying to convince you that he is not crazy and every piece of evidence he uses to convince you just makes you think he is that much crazier.  It just makes the story that much more fun to read because when the narrator interjects that he is not crazy, it cracked me up.  Before the narrator conceals the body he says, “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.” He says this after he has just killed a man for having a pale blue eye.  What kind of logic is that?  The fact that the narrator killed the old man for such an obscure reason made me want to keep reading and convinced me that he was in fact crazy.  Poe’s story convinced me that he is crazy because he goes to the man’s room at the same time for eight days in a row just to look at his eye.  

This is the one of most interesting short story I have read this year.  I love it!  Poe’s writing is brilliant. This story reminds us that your actions will come back to haunt you but in a different way than most stories.  In others stories we see how the perpetrator gets punished by going to jail or something cliche like that but in this story, we don’t know if the narrator got caught for killing the man but we know that he punished himself because he wouldn’t stop hearing the beating of the heart.  
link to the tell-tale heart: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html

A Dark-Brown Dog

My entire life, I have wanted a dog.  I remember begging my parents every time we passed a pet store if we could get a dog and they always said no. They always told me no because I had activities to go to after school and no one would be home to walk the dog.  This year, I stumbled upon the story, A Dark-Brown Dog and was intrigued with the story probably because of my longing for a canine friend.  A Dark-Brown Dog, by Stephen Crane, is a story about a little boy that meets a dog on a street corner. When they first meet, the boy doesn't like the dog and beats him because he thinks it will bring no value to him.  Though the boy continues to beat the dog, the dog follows the boy home.  When they get to the house, the boy and the dog have grown comfortable with each other and after sitting on the steps the boy welcomes him into his family.  The family does not like the dog either and when they first meet the dog, they yell at it and call it names.  The dad finally intervenes and decides to let the boy keep the dog. Throughout the story, the family would beat and throw things at the dog when the boy is not around.  

The first couple sentences, Crane provided amazing descriptions of the setting.  “Sunshine beat upon the cobbles, and a lazy summer wind raised elbow dust which trailed in clouds down the avenue.”  When I read that sentence, I picture a little boy standing next to a fence on the street corner in a rural area.  I get the sense of a rural area because not many urban areas have dust on the street.  Those first sentences are the only descriptions of setting that we get and interestingly, I don't mind that there is not a lot written about the setting.

The part of the story that captured my attention was that Stephen Crane chose to personify the dog when it was experiencing pain.  This stood out to me because it made it seem like the little boy thought of the dog as another human.  By making the boy think of the dog as a human, it helps the readers understand where the boy gets the idea to hit the dog.  When kids are young, they are very impressionable and since this little boy has been beaten before, he thinks it is okay to beat things that he is superior to. Although Crane deliberately does not state that the boy has been abused, he wants the reader to figure it out by themselves and by writing, “He dived under the table, where experience had taught him was a rather safe place”.  This leads us, the readers, to believe that the boy had been abused before.  One day, the father gets drunk and he hits the dog with a coffee maker twice and throws the dog out of a five story window onto a shed.  Though Crane never directly states that the dog is dead, the way he describes how the dog falls, leads us to believe that it is dead.  “The dark-brown body crashed in a heap on the roof of a shed five stories below.  From thence it rolled to the pavement of an alleyway.”  Crane did an exceptional job hinting that the dog was dead in those sentences which made me even more sympathetic to the dog!  When authors don't directly state what they mean it allows the reader room to interpret what the author meant.  Readers of this story wouldn't necessarily know that the dog had died.  I don't even know if the dog had died I just assumed from what I had read that the dog did die. A Dark-Brown Dog is exceptionally written.  Stephen Crane finds way to subtly convey his ideas in the story and leave room for interpretation.  Crane is describing the way that African-Americans were treated after slavery.  It was published in 1901 and was probably written around 1890.  When I first read the title, I took it literally and believed this story was going to be about a dog, but it is really supposed to symbolize African-American men.  The moment when I realized that I was right was when Crane describes how the relationship between the dog and the boy, “The scene of their companionship was a kingdom governed by this terrible potentate, the child; but neither criticism nor rebellion ever lived for an instant in the heart of the one subject.”  I have never read a story that had so much symbolism that could be easily missed.  

         This story made me have so much respect for Stephen Crane because in 1890 slavery had ended about 30 years ago and African-Americans were not very accepted then. The story was published in Cosmopolitan about 1 year after Stephen Crane had died and I think that Cosmopolitan waited to publish the story until after Crane had died so he wouldn't have gotten any hate.  I really liked A Dark-Brown Dog because it is about a topic that was rarely talked about during the time that the story was written.  I have extreme respect for those people who are willing to step out of the social norm and do something or write something that is controversial.  Stories about controversial topics are more interesting than those about cliche topics like the boy meets girl love story.  

link to a dark brown dog: http://web.archive.org/web/20110111180522/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=CraDark.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

Ryan Boudinot- The Littlest Hitler

This was easily the most unrealistic story that I have ever read.  It was about a boy who's father let him go to school on halloween dressed as hitler.  WHAT FATHER WOULD EVER LET THEIR CHILD DO THIS!! The dad was the worst parent ever.  When the kid came home from school sad because he was ridiculed because of his outfit, the dad was mad because he thought that his peers would accept him better.  Throughout the entire story, the kid, Davy, battled with being to kidish (crying because of what people said about his costume), and being too adult (like learning how to roll a joint from his father in fourth grade).  I couldn't tell if this kid was too mature or too much of a baby and that is what made me not like the story.

When I was a kid, my brother and I were sitting in my brothers room playing with beads.  We thought that it would be a great idea to stick beads up our noses.  We did it ourselves at first and then my brother told me I wasn't doing it right and stuck a new bead so far up my nose that it was stuck.  I started to cry and scream which looking back wasn't the best idea because my babysitter came running thinking that one of us had died.  She was so mad when she saw that I had a bead up my nose because "we knew better" which we obviously didn't.  My babysitter took a safety pin un-hinged it and stuck it up my nose to get the bead out which worked.

Flannery O'Connor- A Good Man Is Hard to Find

This story was really weird.  It was about a family that goes on a family vacation and at the end, gets killed by a man that goes by the name as The Misfit.  I expected there to be a moral to this story or something along those lines but there wasn't.  The story was incredibly random and there was no point to it.  The grandmother was the person that had the main role in the story.  The grandmother was the one that caused the accident because she asked the father and convinced the kids to beg their father to go to some old plantation and she realized that it was in a different state.  This grandmother was very erratic and it seemed like she had short term memory loss.  The part of the story that struck out to me the most was when the grandmother called a black kid a nigger and a pickaninny.  I was not expecting this story to be set in a time pretty close to slavery.

I have no idea how the title of the story A Good Man Is Hard to Find because it never really came up in the short story.  The father Bailey was a very hard man and didn't really enjoy anything while The Misfit was crazy and had people killed just because he felt like it.

Joyce Carol Oates- Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

This story was so weird and so creepy.  Reading it made me want to get under the covers with my stuffed animal and never speak to men again.  Arnold Friend was SO CREEPY! Everything that he would do in this story would make my skin crawl. I knew the minute when she met Arnold on her little movie date with that other guy that he would try to rape/kidnap her.  I thought it was weird that Connie didn't realize that Arnold did not have good intentions until she realized how old Arnold and his buddy Ellie looked.  They way he was first introduced just made him seem creepy: "It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold.  He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin.  Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn't help glancing back and there he was till watching her.  He wagged a finger and laughed and said, 'Gonna get you, baby'" It was at that moment that a red flag went up in my mind.  When Arnold was at Connie's house the day after they had their first encounter, Arnold would say things like, I know everything about you and shit like that and Connie was still so clueless that he was not a good person.  The biggest red flag in this story was how Arnold knew Connie's name and where she lived!  Connie didn't even question how she found where she lived she only wondered how she knew her name.  I did not like the ending because I have no idea what happened to Connie. 

The song that captures the mood of the story for me is the theme song to jaws:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9QTSyLwd4w

John Updike- A & P

John Updike's story, A & P had a very interesting format to it.  I thought that it could easily be classified as a vignette because it focused on one moment and that was the anticipation of the girls going to his check up counter.  I really liked that it focused on this moment because I was able to really picture how these girls looked and how they walked.  Updike was very descriptive in every aspect of the short story.  One of the main things that classifies a good story for me is if I can picture myself as if I am the main character in the story, with A & P I absolutely could.

My favorite passage of the short story is:
"She was the queen.  She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round.  She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs.  She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didm;t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and the letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a litter deliberate extra action into it."

This is my favorite passage because I can just imagine a girl in a bikini strutting through a small shop in a beach town.  I can hear the sound that her heavy feet hit the floor.  This passage is important because it shows off Updike's ability to describe things in great detail.

Gabriel García Márquez- A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Gabriel García Márquez's short story, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings was very weird to read.  I felt like it was written by sitting in a room with kindergardeners asking them to help him write a story.  It seemed like Márquez was asking the kids questions like, Is he apart of the circus? I didn't really like the short story at all.  It was extremely confusing but it did have very vivid descriptions and the last sentence was amazing.  "...,because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea."  That last sentence was the part of the short story that stood out to me the most because I can picture this woman sitting in a garden cutting onions but looking off into the distance as a person slowly becomes just a dot in the distance.

Questions I had while reading the short story:
1. Is this old man actually an angel?
2. Why didn't the family release the angel?
3. Why did the hold the angel captive?

Naguib Mahfouz- Half a Day

Naguib Mahfouz short story Half a Day was easy to read.  I found it interesting and straight to the point because it was very short.  The kid in the story had the same feelings about school that I have that the first day was awful I cried and I wanted to leave and the kid in the story did not want to go to school. I found it weird how at the end it was an old man looking back at his school days and I didn't really understand that, that was what the short story was about.

Junot Diaz- How to Date a brown girl (black girl, white girl or halfie)

Junot Diaz's How to Date a brown girl was very hard to read.  I thought that every passage was incredibly demeaning to women saying how we are easy to manipulate.  This whole short story was entirely about how to manipulate women into sleeping with you.  On the first page, Diaz says "If she's a whitegirl you know you'll at least get a hand job."  WHY IS THAT A THING?  Why does Diaz think that every white girl that comes over to his house is going to give a hand job? Diaz would also say things like "Give one of your boys a shout and when he says, Are you still waiting on that bitch? say, Hell yeah."  This was one of the worst parts of the short story.  The character in the story obviously has no respect for women if he lets his friends call them bitches and then agree with it.

Here is some dating advice on my own:
If a guy ever lets his friends call you a bitch and then agree with what they said, run the other way.  This guy obviously has no respect for you and his only intention is to get into your pants.  This isn't the only sign to tell that he is a douche bag, he might take you to a Wendy's if you are from out of town.  Though you may not realize this, while you are at this "elegant" dinner the only think that he will be thinking of is "does she like dominicans?"

Margaret Atwood- Happy Endings

Margaret Atwood's Happy Endings was really great.  It had a very organic feel and was a refreshing thing to read because I had never read something like that.  I thought it was interesting how in almost every part, the phrase "stimulating and challenging" was repeated.  This phrase stood out to me because stimulating and challenging are two intriguing words.  I really liked the tone of the narrator it felt very animated like it could be in SNL or something. I didn't realize that all the parts corresponded with the other parts until the end and that was a pleasant surprise.  I really want to read more of Atwood's work to see if all her writing is as animated and creative as this one.

Here is my rendition of a Margaret Atwood short story:
G.
Mary and John have been happily married for 20 years and have two sets of twins! The first set are two boys Freddy and Joshua and the second set are a boy and a girl Nathan and Claudette.  Wow. Mary can hardly believe that she popped so many kids out.  As you can tell, she is not up to par down there so John (as most guys would) turns to cheap hookers for pleasure.  Poor Mary, she is so clueless and has no idea that John has looked somewhere else for satisfaction, until one day  Claudette catches her father parked on a cliff with his regular supplier bobbing between his knees.  Out of horror, Claudette releases the parking break and watches as her father and the prostitute roll off the cliff and into the ocean.  After years of mourning, Mary gets remarried and lives happily ever after.

Isabelle Allende- And of Clay We Are Created

Isabelle Allende's And of Clay We Are Created is one of the most fantastic short stories that I have ever read.  The language in it was beautiful.  Allende would use phrases like "buoyed by a premature optimism" to get across the simplest thoughts.  This story jerked my heart and made me anxious as the days and hours passed by as the girl waited for the pump to come.  It thought it was so kind how Rolf waited by the mud with her until she died.  This was lovely because he was out there for a long time and he didn't do it for publicity.  I loved how Allende showed her view of political figures helping out during natural disasters.  "The President of the Republic visited the area in his tailored safari jacket to confirm that this was the worst catastrophe of the century;"  I loved this because it spoke to how politicians really are.  They show up trying to "blend in" with jungle outfits to say that this is a really bad disaster but only for publicity.   They do not try and help even when they say that they will.

Writing an article about air pollution would be nice.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/

Kate Chopin- The Story of an Hour

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin was an interesting story to read.  It was about a woman who's husband who had just died and how she reacted to it.  She was very happy that her husband had died because she could now do whatever she wanted.  To me, this was weird because though she has a just reason to be happy for her husband's death, she should still take a couple days to grieve.  Josephine just went straight to being happy which was wrong.  At the beginning of the book, I thought she was crazy because she started to talk to herself and repeat the words free.  I liked the character Josephine mostly because my middle name but also because she wasn't afraid to say how she really felt. I liked the short story though because the ending was really unexpected.   If I was a woman in the 19th century, I don't think that I would be happy that I could do whatever I wanted because I would have to do everything my self and I wouldn't know how to do anything.  People would have been doing everything for me and I wouldn't even know how to cook.