The Red Convertible

            This short story was written in 1984 by Louise Erdrich.  This story is all about two brothers and the relationship and hardships they both endure before and after the older brother, Henry, was drafted into the war in Vietnam.

            The younger brother, Lyman, was very good at making money, and he and Henry went splits on a nice shiny new red Oldsmobile convertible.  They took this car and went on a road trip to wherever they felt like, at one point they were even in Alaska.

            After Henry gets back from war, he is in an extremely bad mental state, he rarely talked to anyone and he never mentioned the Olds.  Lyman decides he was going to do something about it to try and get his older brother back.  Lyman beats the ever living crap out of the car, puts dirt in the engine and ruins the upholstery and when Henry is shown the state of the car, he gets extremely mad at Lyman and locks himself in the garage to work on the car.  Finally, Henry gets the car back in working order and has it looking like new.

The two brothers take the car for a drive and take a break at a river and have a few beers, when Henry decided to take a swim in the river and was drowned by his boots filling with water. After Henry drowned, Lyman put the car in gear and let it drive itself into the river.

I find this story very inspiring and very sad.  The end of the story shocked me greatly, right as the two brothers were getting along and as Henry was getting better, tragedy struck and he died.  This ending was extremely surprising.

A Worn Path

This short story was written by Eudora Welty in 1940.  This story is about an old African-American lady who walks into town to get medicine for her ailing grandson.  This walk isn’t your ordinary 20 minute walk to a store on a nice sidewalk though, nope!! This woman has to endure many hardships along the way.

The elderly lady’s name is Phoenix Jackson, she is a very old lady, and has a bit of a rough time getting around. At one point Phoenix has a hallucination in the forest, and once in town she even forgets her grandsons name.  One would think that she would stop this trip and get someone else to get the medicine for her grandson, but they have no one else, just each other.

Phoenix’s trip is a very long one that takes a good part of the day to make it into town.  On this trip she has to travel through a forest filled with wildlife and a lot of dangers, she has to cross on a log over water.  This could be very dangerous because if she fell, there might not be anyone around for ages to help her, and it could prove to be very fatal.

I really enjoyed this story because it showed the love that the grandmother had for her grandson, because he had swallowed lye by accident some years ago, she was willing to go on this trip as often as needed no matter how old, how tired or how frail she was.  This story was a very good example of the unbreakable bond of love!

Boys and Girls

Boys and Girls is a short story by Alice Munro in 1968.  Munroe was born in Wingham, Ontario in 1931.  Her writing centres around every day human life, relationships and interactions.

The story centers around a young girl who was always with her dad and admired him very much.  She loved helping her dad, who was a fox pelter / farmer, with the silver foxes they kept in pens in their yard.  Even though back in this era girls were given a lot of work to do inside the house, she was pardoned from most of it and worked outside with her dad, her brother was still quite young and small to be doing a lot of the work.

One day. Their horse, Flora, was being led out to be shot, as she was no longer needed around the farm.  Flora managed to escape the father and his helper and was running towards the gate to escape, the girl could have shut it but she didn’t and let the horse escape so her father wouldn’t kill it.  Later at supper, after the father had recaptured the horse and shot it, the girls brother told on her and her father said “She’s only a girl” in a very demeaning fashion.

In this story the girl also stays unnamed even though she is the main character, and her brother, Laird, who isn’t a main character, is in possession of a name.  This shows the author stressing the fathers last words in the story, being that girls meant nothing, they were only good to make food and do chores.

I do not agree with the fathers point of view, I believe that girls are just as important as boys and should be treated equally, especially by a figure as important as a dad!

My Papa's Waltz

My Papa’s Waltz is a poem that was written by Theodore Roethke in 1948.  This poem describes the violent dancing a boy endures with his father.  It is controversial as to whether or not the boy is enjoying this experience, and whether or not this father is being violent or just lovingly roughhousing with his son.

It is shown in this poem that the father has ingested quite a bit of alcohol, the boy describing it as whiskey, “The whiskey on your breath \ Could make a small boy dizzy” which could lead to one wondering if the father is dancing violently out of alcohol rage, “But I hung on like death: \ Such waltzing was not easy”, or if the father is just a very lively dancer.

This could also bring one to ask if using the word dancing is just another way of showing the father’s violence towards the son. “The hand that held my wrist \ Was battered on one knuckle”, this could be a hint towards the father beating the son or maybe he just hurt his hand somehow.

This poem is extremely hard to decipher, and depending on who you are and how you take in the given information, this could look like simple tomfoolery between a father and son, or it could look like an act of abuse in this family.

I personally think that the father and the son are just having a grand ol’ time, and the reason the son can smell whiskey on his father’s breath is because maybe the father just got back from work, where he might have hurt his hand, and decided to have a relaxing evening drink after a hard, trying day at work.

Eleanor Rigby

Eleanor Rigby is a song by The Beatles from the album Revolver.  It was written mostly by Paul McCartney and the credit is pretty much all given to John Lennon and Paul McCartney. This song is all about the loneliness of two people and how they are so close to each other (in distance), yet so far away. Neither of them does anything to solve their loneliness, they don't even go out and talk to people or have coffee with someone.

In the end Father Mackenzie is still lonely and darns his own socks, a job which was primarily the woman's job of the house, and Eleanor Rigby died lonely. No one even came to her funeral, which Father Mackenzie performed.

The two of them worked together in the church, Eleanor was in a janitorial position”… picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been”, and Father Mackenzie performed the ceremonies at that church, him being the Father and all.  It was implied that Eleanor did not show how she was really feeling in front of everyone “Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door”.

I love The Beatles and most of their works.  I find that even though a lot of people say they were just high and had no clue what they were talking about when they made their songs, they actually have a lot of deep meaning works with a lot of feeling in them.  Another great song to look at would be Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

Eveline

Eveline, is a short story once again written by James Joyce, and is in the Dubliners series. I found this story a bit more interesting, but not much. This story is all about a young women, just barely out of her teens who is debating leaving her house, taking a boat with the man she been courting, and marrying him.

 On her mother’s death bed, Eveline promised her mother that she would never sell, or leave the family house, and this is one of the reasons Eveline is having such a hard time deciding whether she really should leave, or if she should just stay at home and make do with her miserable life.  Her and the young man from Buenos Ayres have only been courting for a short while, and even though she has no one to look after, she still feels strapped down by the promise she made to her dead mother. 

So finally she goes to the ship and is getting ready to soon board, and is thinking to herself that she deserves happiness, love and a life to live.  But as the times arrives and she has to board the ship, Eveline chickens out and leaves Frank to take the ship all by himself, because it is too late and he, himself cannot get off. 

If I were in Eveline’s shoes I think I would want to leave, even if I had made that promise.  Sure, I would feel extremely guilty for a while, but after spending time away in a new house with a new family, I imagine that happiness would soon overtake that guilt.

The song Eveline by Nickel Creek was inspired by this story.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKizkUlgob8

Araby

Araby, by James Joyce, was published in 1914, in his series called Dubliners. I found this story kind of hard to follow, I do not know whether it was because I just had a hard time getting in to it, or if it was because of the style of writing, which I found to be all over the place (which could once again be because I found this story to be very drab).

The narrator in this story is a boy who is always out playing with his friends, who are also boys of his age.  He finds that he likes his friend’s sister and when she hints one day that she would like something from the market, he goes.  The narrator is expecting the market, Araby, to be some wild magical market, but instead, when he gets there he realise it is nothing more than a building full of materialistic items and people.  This also brings the narrator to realise that Mangam’s sister was just using him for materialistic reasons, to get her something nice, so she herself wouldn’t have to go and waste her own precious time and money.

I found this story extremely bland and lacking of interest.  The only reason I chose to write about this was because I still have six other blogs to fill up and figured if I complained a bit it would take up some space that I needed to fill, and make the load a bit lighter and a bit easier.  I would not recommend this story to anyone, unless you are reading the whole Dubliner series, then it might be a bit more interesting.

Dead Man's Path

Dead Men’s Path is a short story that was written by Chinua Achebe.  Achebe’s actual full name is Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe. The Nigerian artist was born in 1930. He has a best-selling world renowned book called Things Fall Apart. This book is one of the most read books in African literature nowadays.

The short story Dead Man’s Path is all about tradition and respecting our elders and other cultures.  This story is all about a man, Michael Obi, and his wife, Nancy Obi.  Michael is offered a job at a school as headmaster, which he accepts enthusiastically and his wife, a little less enthusiastically.  The Ndume school he was appointed to was “backward in every sense of the word”.  The Obi’s decided to put all of their time into this school, Michael made sure the teaching was top-notch and his wife made the grounds gorgeous with her “dream-gardens”.

                While making her dream gardens and running the school, the Obi’s noticed that elders from the community were walking right through the gardens and through the school yards.  Michael did not like this at all and he placed sticks and barbed wires and blocked off the path.  The village priest then called Michael and called him out on this.  The priest said that this foot path was how their ancestors visited them and then Michael decided to mock him and tell the priest that that was the reason they closed off the path “The whole purpose of our school… is to eradicate just such beliefs as that… Our duty is to teach your children to laugh at such ideas”.  The priest then left and the next day when the Obi’s woke up, their gardens were completely wrecked and even one of the school buildings was torn down.

                I believe that the Obi’s should have respected the elder’s enough to talk this out with them before they put up barbed wire, but the elders should have tried to compromise, saying maybe they wouldn’t walk there during school hours.

Stones

The short story Stones was written by Timothy Findley in 1988. Timothy Findley was a Canadian playwright and novelist from Toronto.  It is also rumoured that he had a small part in a movie “John Cabot: A Man of the Renaissance”  but it was never know if he was or not. 

Dieppe

                So, the short story Stones is about a family in the WWII era, and the hardships they suffered because of the ongoing war.  The narrator of this story is one of the sons in the story, named Ben.  Ben’s father, like many other men, was called into the line of duty to fight for the Canadian military in WWII.  The father was sent to Dieppe and he ditched, turned back and left the other men to fight for themselves.  Because of his actions, the father was dishonorably discharged from the Canadian military and was sent back home with shame on his shoulders and in his face.  The father is having a hard time dealing with the events of the war and the outcome of his actions and is seemingly insane.  After strangling and almost killing the mother, he leaves home and lives alone for the rest of his life.  The son takes his ashes and spreads them all over Dieppe.

                I found this story very intriguing because it shows a very real part of many families lives who lived through WWII,  at first their lives were normal and happy, then suddenly everything was ripped apart by the turmoil of WWII.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

The poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night was written by Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas was a poet/writer from Wales who, strangely enough, wrote his works in english only. He was born in 1914 and only lived to be 39 years old. Thomas wrote, not only poems, but short stories and film and radio scripts! When I first read the title I thought it was just about a person who didn't want to go to sleep, but later found out that the them is death and the poem is actually about someone fighting against death and the thought of death.

                This poem pretty much just describes somebody’s opinion of death and how they think everyone should act when it comes to them or someone around them dying. The person who is giving their opinion is saying to fight when death knocks on your door and to try and keep living as long as possible, to stay strong no matter what anyone else says on the topic of death.

                My personal opinion is that death eventually comes to visit us all and there isn’t much about it that we can do, but it is everyone’s personal opinion when it comes to such a controversial topic such as this. Now if the person said we should all eat healthy and exercise plenty to stay healthy and alive for as long as possible then I would have to strongly agree with him!  This poem creates plenty of controversy to such a private issue.