Short story - I have encountered many stories in my life so far.

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Kimberly Wong

Short Story – Literature Coursework

        I have encountered many stories in my life so far.  Some have been read to me, and some I have read myself.  Many have been told to me, and there are few I have actually experienced.  Obviously I do not remember all of them, but the ones that I do remember are in my memory because they had a strong effect on me. Either I had a strong feeling about them, or I could relate to them.  

Short stories are very different compared to reading a normal book or novel, because the author must condense all of his/her ideas into such few words and sentences.  This brings a mixture of feelings, some very strong into a short amount of time, instead of being spread throughout hundreds of pages.  To me, I felt that each of the short stories that we studied stirred up a combination of emotions in me, sometimes from very positive, to very negative, which it why I found this topic to be very interesting.  

        The first short story, ‘Just Like That,’ by Michael Richards, left a negative impact on me.  I found the story to be very unsettling and somewhat disturbing.  First of all, the language and phrasing of the story brought a dark, depressing feeling over me.  The first word of the story is ‘dead.’  This immediately gave me a negative feeling, and I knew that this was not going to be a cheerful, positive story.  Throughout the whole story, the phrase, “dead, just like that,” was repeated over and over again, repeating the depressing feeling over and over again, and the tone in which the it was said, was very heartless and cold.  But even furthermore, the character of the man disturbed and even kind of angered me.  He was cruel, and merciless towards the kangaroos.  This was shown by his actions.  The way he treated the kangaroos brought up some anger in me because he had no regard for another living creature, although not human.  It seemed like he treated them like toys, there for his disturbing pleasure.  The phrases that the author used really made me cringe, being able to imagine the pain that I would feel if that happened to me.  Phrases like, ‘he poked its belly,’ and ‘he dropped it so it fell like raw meat,’ made me glower.  His actions never seemed to be positive, but always negative, making me despise him more and more as the story went on. To make these feelings even worse, the actions of the man got even more unsettling as well, as the story went on.  The author used more gruesome phrases like, ‘the man kicked the doe in the stomach,’ and ‘he kicked its head,’ to really push, and emphasize his inhumane character.  Even farther on, he used the phrase, ‘he kicked its face,’ which I think was really the climax, the limit to how far this could go.  When I heard, ‘he kicked his head,’ I felt very disturbed already.  But when I heard, ‘he kicked his face,’ I felt even more horrible inside because I could imagine the pain, and it was just more brutal.  Also, the sentence, ‘he watched while the man strolled among the cripples blessing each with his wand.’  It was a very unique, sentence to pick for an act such as this.  It put two pictures in my mind.  The word ‘blessing’ brought a sense of a very good, lucky, pure and holy act.  The word ‘wand,’ made it very fairy-tale like.  Put together, I had a picture of a fairy going around tapping the kangaroos with her wand, giving them something better.  But, what the author really meant with the word ‘blessing,’ and shooting, and the ‘wand,’ was his gun.  These two opposite emotions in this sentence really accentuated it, and this image, along with the sentence stayed in my mind.  

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        The other character in the story, the boy didn’t have as much of an impact on me as the man did because he acted like a normal young boy would in this kind of situation.  I felt as though he was in the story to make the character of the man seem even worse.  For example, if the man was hunting with another man, his friend, and they both did those actions, I would still feel disgusted and shocked by their actions, but instead, the author chose a boy.  He chose a young, innocent boy, who would still cry over things. ...

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