To Build A Fire

Did we have to do this? I don't remember but I'll talk about it anyway. I actually was not that unhappy with 'To Build A Fire'. By the end of the story, I was very cold, either because the librarian had been playing with the thermostat, or because I was feeling the cold. My ears were sort of aching and my nose was freezing!

I was absolutely delighted with the whole dog thing. It would have been really depressing if he was all by himself and died, but then you had this nice little pup tag along. (I generally dislike Huskies, but I imagined it slightly differently) I don't know what it was about it, but I really liked it whenever you heard about the dog or what he was thinking. The man was a little bit mean to him, but hopefully he ended up with a nice owner. I could imagine the dog so well! (Except for when I changed him from a husky to a sort or cross between a shiba inu and a husky) But anyway, I was always sort of both happy and attentive whenever I heard what the dog was thinking or what it was doing. I don't think that it should have had to take that dangerous journey, but it seemed to know a lot better than the man did. It was just sort of cool the way the dog knew instinctively to do things.

The man really should have been traveling with someone, but I can't think of someone he could have gone with to get there. It was a bit painful to read about him trying to make a second fire after the first was put out by snow. There's just no way he should be able to start another one. Then he does and puts it out again! It was really frustrating. By this time everything is numb, and he tries to run to get to camp, and he keeps falling until he eventually gives up and dies. It does make the title make a little more sense. (Just a little)

At the beginning of the story, I was sort of lost because the author gives you so little information. It was also sort of strange (and cool) when his spit crackled in the air. But other than that it looked like it was cold and dreary.

What else? I thought the biscuits 'sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon' sounded pretty nasty, especially when he thinks of them so much. Does this sound good to anyone? Honestly, why would you want bacon grease??

And so I get back to him building a fire to unfreeze his feet. It seems so hopeful, it's getting larger, stronger, and then boom! A lot of snow falls down on him. It seems like one of the first things you'd watch out for if you were that experienced. After that it seemed hopeless, then he magically gets it to start again, but it goes back out after he suffocates it with too much. Then it's all over, any hope is gone, he's dead. Then he tries to kill the poor dog, and I was really afraid he would, but he can't do it. The husky has already been pushed into the water and is obviously scared of the man, because of this 'whiplash' sound he makes. Anyway, I would have been more sad it he had killed the dog than if he had just died by himself. The husky had two sides, one was of internal, instinctive knowledge, and this great understanding of things and the other was a sort of helpless, uneasy, dog. He couldn't start a fire to keep warm, or have an extra coat, but he also knew how to keep himself alive, like by picking the ice out of his paws. But the man never gave him any food! Anyway, I liked how he made the dog seem realistic. I was almost happy when he trotted away from the man in the end. He had been loyal to him, sitting there patiently before he knew the man was dead, running with him, and just staying with the man, but when he was dead it was sort of like "Oh, he's dead. Time to go."

Anyway, I actually liked this story better than some of the others, and I thought it was very easy to see and feel everything that the man and his dog were going through. It was a lot nicer without the comments and questions on the sides. It was sort of like this overall theme that people shouldn't try to out-smart nature or something, because the dog kept thinking 'This is a terrible idea, we should be warm and safe!' and the man kept trying to go on, even though it was a bad idea. Anyway, I thought it was a sort of cool story (especially because it's been so cold this week!).

The Most Dangerous Game

I have just read another creepy short story. I actually found that I was enjoying this, maybe because we just read two other unsettling stories, maybe because there's a guy who lives on an island in a giant mansion/castle-or should I say palatial chateau? As soon as he meets General Zaroff, you know he's evil, whether you read the summary at the beginning or not. Although it seems like you're supposed to like him, I wrote "He's creepy" and then I wrote it again after it pointed out he had sharp and pointy teeth. (All those questions on the side were distracting) Ivan just disappointed me. It seems he should have been nice or something, but he quite obviously wasn't. Then he just suddenly dies in a trap, which makes you feel worse, because it should have been Zaroff, but of course, it wasn't.

Rainsford was just strange, because at the beginning I thought he was just a real jerk who liked to kill animals. Then I slowly felt like he wasn't so bad, when he does reasonable things (tells the time from the sun, deals so well with a big scary guy with a gun, etc.) He also seems pretty observant, all of which probably come with a lot of hunting. Personally, I was pretty mad when he was talking on the ship with his fellow hunter, all he was saying about hunting, but he certainly drew the line when it came to hunting people, so he clearly thinks there's some huge difference or something.

He does come up with some good plans for killing Zaroff, but I'm a little curious about why Zaroff left him alive. I mean, he follows this almost invisible trail right to the tree where he's hiding, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to find him after that point. So he concludes it's cat and mouse, but he seemed awfully quick about killing the first guy (the one where you hear the gunshots before he knows where he is). But I almost feel like he doesn't really want to kill Rainsford at all. At the 'tiger pit' he pops out of hiding, obvious and unprotected because he thinks he has finally killed Zaroff. He really could have killed him right there, but no, he lets him go again. After all of the ways he seems so good at his 'game', he still seems pretty darn scared when he jumps out from behind the curtains. I feel a little like the creepy smiles and the yelling were fake, like he had no idea if he was there or not, but he figured Rainsford would feel more frightened if he happened to be there and listening. If he wasn't what was he going to lose? He obviously wasn't afraid of anyone else thinking he was stupid for randomly yelling and smiling to no one, because no one else was there to care. Of course, then the author does sort of make it clear he's playing a game with him, so maybe he really did know he was there.

Zaroff, the creepy pointy-toothed, hunter Cossack man, hunts people. I have to wonder how much you'd have to hunt to want to start getting more intelligent animals. He says his life is hunting (which we didn't really need him to say) but I think there's a point where you would think about the lives of all these animals. For example, today (and this is a very real example in case you were wondering) in social studies about five girls screamed as they spotted a spider which was probably only more than a quarter inch long and some people ran to get a piece of paper to put it out the window (which was probably how it got in) when a large tennis shoe squished it right into the carpet. I was impressed because it normally gets stomped right away, but there were people trying to save it! Anyway, our teacher said, "The poor little spider just wanted to get a history lesson, you could have just put him out the window!" and that got me thinking that the poor little spider probably was trying to get somewhere, or do something, which always makes you feel bad it dies and is now practically inside out all over the carpet. What I'm saying is that it seems like there would be a point where he accidentally killed something meaningful to him, like his dog, but that didn't seem to bother him. I just think that after so much hunting you'd eventually stop and think about the animal you killed. I can hardly get down to the 'mouse' level of killing things. I couldn't kill a bird, or and the worst I've done is put a spider in a jar and starve it (accidentally) The scary part was when he offered to show his 'newer' collection of heads, no doubt human. Personally, all the cut off buffalo heads and deer heads make me quite ill, and I'm always afraid they'll fall off the wall and squish me, and it's just not pleasant to look up at it. But to cut off a human head? Can you imagine mounting those on the wall? If you tried to put it on like and animals head, it would always be staring down at you, which would be WAY too much for me. So then what do you do? Put it in a glass case on a peg or something? I think it's slightly scary to be stared at by a person, especially if they're dead.

The ending was sort of disappointing. I got excited when he screamed, but then the hunted kills the hunter and you have to wonder if he ever learned his lesson (either of them) Did Rainsford stop hunting forever? Did he even get back home? Did he free all the trapped people? It's just seems weird that he could ever hunt again and not be disturbed by thoughts of this creepy guy with pointy teeth. (Plus the whole white hair but black eyebrows thing) I feel like he might have been punished some way else, but I can't think of a good way.

Where does this fall in overall creepiness? It depends on how much time you take to imagine the thought of making a game of hunting people. I think Zaroff himself would top off as the creepiest character so far. I even gave up calling him Zaroff after I said Zar-zoff too many times, so I remember him as Zarzoff, not Zaroff. He does however, back up murdering people pretty well for it otherwise seeming so absolutely terrible. When I listened to him reason, it was almost to a point where I could see what he saw in needing a more intelligent being to outsmart. But the whole time I remembered how strange and absolutely crazy he must be to want to do that, so it was never to a point where he made absolute sense. I honestly still think the castle was really amazing, and although it seemed slightly random, it made the story more interesting.

Another question, what 'game' is it when it says The Most Dangerous Game? Are we talking game as in the game the two men played, or game as in the man being the most dangerous game? The author puts it in both ways, but I think either way it is a very fitting title. It's kind of cool how it provokes so many thoughts, though. How many more creepy stories are we going to read? Does anyone have the patience to read all this? Do we have to fill out all the information in the back? And more importantly, how long will I remember what 'palatial chateau' means?

The Lottery

This week I read 'The Lottery'. 'The Lottery' is a short story, as we can tell, about a lottery of sorts. I was told that if I found that 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find' was creepy, I'd think that this one was much more unsettling. I actually didn't find it nearly so much as 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find' and I'm sure that some of you who read this disagree. It's just that with this short story, you get to the point where you know something bad is going to happen, and you just are bored or don't want to wait to know whose name is going to be picked. (And I found it slightly distracting that the last name Dunbar sounded a lot like Delmar while I was reading, and so I kept thinking of Delmar in that place instead of someone else.)

Anyway, I think I didn't find this story quite as disturbing because, although you were still left with the image of her dying, there wasn't as much of a sense of surprise and horror. I don't know how to describe what I mean! In 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' there is one murderer and a conversation where you learn about his past and one by one, he goes and kills the family. In this story, a whole group of people kills one person, and I find it less creepy because instead of being a crazy killer, it's a group of people who just feel obligated to kill.

When I read it, I felt terrible for the lady, picturing her being stoned by her friends and even her little son, but instead of feeling horrified of her death, I felt angry at the people who killed her. It's just that I wanted to tell them that they were being stupid and unfair and that if no one liked it then they shouldn't kill anyone. The author just doesn't put in anything to make you feel horrified. In 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find' you have a conversation between the killer and his victim about it, which makes it super creepy and unsettling, but in The Lottery' you aren't given that kind of information. You don't know that much about the woman who dies, you don't know much about the people who kill her, she doesn't include what it's like for someone to stone another person who they knew. Even though they have been doing this for years and years, I just don't feel like a person could kill another without the reader being able to see some hesitation or regret. They say they want to get it over quickly, but that only makes them seem more heartless. I guess I don't feel like the people are as realistic.

I think anyone could look at it and say 'This is great writing and it's very haunting," because I think the author is a good one, and it's extremely haunting to think that these people think it's the right thing to do, but I feel like there's more to it than that. Maybe if I had read this before the other short stories I would think differently, but it's very difficult not to compare them. One thing that might make one 'darker' than the other is that in one it starts out like a normal day. A family is going on a trip, but after that, everything spirals down. The other starts with a way too cheery day feel, and ends in a depressing way which for me, made them very different.

I'm trying to find a better way to phrase what I mean, but it's not going so well! One thing is that you feel like by the end of 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find' that it's hopeless and that she has to die, but you still find it creepy. In this one, instead of feeling the same hopelessness, you instead feel like it's the people's fault. They don't have to stone her, and it's their own major decision to kill this defenseless woman. It just doesn't make you feel unhappy in the same way the other story does. I also think that it might be because in 'The Lottery' they have a reason to kill her. I think that's part of it! It's not so unsettling to think they think they have a reason to stone someone to death, whereas to think some innocent woman is picked off of the street and stoned for no reason would, to me, be much more frightening.

With what I was saying with some of the people being 'unrealistic' it wasn't that they were fake characters, it just seemed like no one could actually do such a thing. What makes one scary and the other not might have to do with how realistic the whole idea is. Both stories obviously seem crazy and unsettling, but when I think about it, I feel like our car flipping over and being killed by a crazy person is more likely to happen then me living in a small village where people get stoned.

However much I have said it wasn't that dark, I think it was a hard comparison, because by itself, it does trouble me to think of someone creating such a story. To think that they are raising children to think this was right and that they must do it, is just scary. At the end, it says that someone gave her tiny son a few pebbles to throw, and I found that that was also a little scary for me. They are making someone do something without him knowing it is a bad thing to do or that he is killing the person who raised him. If such a tradition were to happen, it would be both terrifying and disastrous, every year. You would be taking someone who meant a lot to someone, and throwing them away, imagine how many kids would end up orphans! Which also confuses me because it seems like you might run out of people. I guess that might not actually happen.

For whatever reason, it was very easy to imagine this story. It might not have seemed real, but I could see all the characters when I read it. I ended up thinking about how the next generation might be able to stop it, or even the one after that, because when it says they don't know why it happens, it seems like the parents might secretly tell their children that one day they should stand up against it and stop such a terrible tradition. It also left me thinking, could I do that to a friend, a parent, a sibling? I just have this terrible image of a group of people throwing rocks at a tiny crying baby. How much would it break a mother's heart to see her tiny child die?

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Today I read 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O'Conner. I don't (usually) cry at stories, especially ones that are only about eleven pages long. And don't get me wrong, I didn't cry, I just sat there for a really long time thinking about it. I cry over stupid things, like 'I don't get this' and 'I can't believe I did something so stupid' and some not-so-stupid things. I cried at my grandma's funeral, and over a documentary about blood diamonds. But I just didn't cry. It was weird, because when I started, I picked up my pencil and wrote down things like 'These kids are really acting badly' and that the grandmother was a little crazy. As I got to the end I completely stopped taking notes, thinking about writing down my thoughts. I wasn't writing that much before, but I completely stopped after they met him. I don't even like calling him 'The Misfit'. I don't know. I sometimes, in the Odyssey, underline whole paragraphs and then feel stupid and erase some of the underlined stuff, but I just sort of underlined everything at the very end. It was all sort of sweet, the way the grandmother wanted to earn the love and respect of her grandchildren, and she misses the way it was, and an evil part of you says that her son, Bailey, really was being a jerk. I looked back at what I wrote at the beginning and it didn't even matter to me anymore after that. I don't care where they are, why they're going, why her son was so mean. I still sort of wonder how it might have been better if she hadn't recognized him, if she hadn't smuggled the cat in, if she hadn't tried to impress her grandchildren, if she had stayed at home, or gone to 'east Tennessee'. I normally hate stories where things are so dependent on what happened before them. There were thousands of ways they could have avoided the ending, it's just upsetting that it had to be this way. It's disappointing the mother/wife never really got a part. It's sad he couldn't have even spared the baby. It's just upsetting to think there is someone who would do that to their mother, or brother. Anyone. I don't get how it can say Bailey is her only son who she lives with when it's true that there was another. Maybe she just lost him somewhere, maybe he never came back to her by choice. I don't know, but she would be the only person to know his story. Just to know that the kids might have grown up, the baby might have grown up, it's a story, but the fact that it can make you wonder about all this stuff. Over and over I've been saying to myself I don't know, I don't know. I've written it many times, and deleted a few because it's probably frustrating to read.
I could go through and highlight all the things I thought were really great ways of description, but I can't do it. I don't want to go past the first page anymore. I loved the grandma's fight, her character that tried to get away with things (like some elderly people do sometimes). I loved to hear him talk, to hesitate to think about himself. I loved the whole last half. I loved the whole story. Each time I look at what I wrote (and am writing now), I feel stupid, over and over. But I don't really want to think about it. I made it easy to forget about, I made it easy to think of something else, but I can't not think about it when I look at it. It's scary someone could write this, in a way. It's so simple. They go on a car trip and there's an accident, and a murderer on the loose who happens to be her son and kills them. The author was so careful to explain the characters that with every thing they say it makes it harder for me to think of them suddenly torn to bits by this author. I guess that's why I don't miss the mom so much. She had no name, she had nothing to say, she sat a lot, but then why do I miss the baby so much more? I keep feeling stupid I feel this way about a little made-up story, feeling stupid that I couldn't ever write like that, stupid that I don't even know what to say about this story. It's such a creepy story! How would it feel to look back and see that you created this?