This was a really interesting story to me as it took such a small moment and exploded it into extreme detail. It felt like the whole thing could’ve easily been a 5 minute scene if it were a film. Not only did this make it easy to follow but it forced the reader to be dropped into the middle of a scene. In only the first paragraph alone, imminent danger can be felt based on the descriptions of the narrator and the situation. It didn’t take a moment to set the stage rather than force the reader to be apart of it. Another element of the story that stuck out to me was how the narrator was a “bad but human” character. Yes, he sounds like an asshole, but he was still written to be a human being. This image was evident in the descriptors of his anxiety and the desire to preserve his relationship with his daughter. Although it doesn’t redeem his behavior, he even admits his faults. The author’s choice in painting him as human made his character feel real and believable. It also added a layer of complexity to the situation that allowed for a look behind the curtain into the narrators mind.
This story definitely stood out to me from the others we’ve read so far – I think this is due in part to in being shorter than the others we’ve read and also how contained it is. I liked how this story tackled a single event in the authors life rather than attempting to cover all of the events leading up to now. As the story went on the evidence against the author became more and more incriminating, which I think served the story excellently as it was from his point of view and it felt like he was trying to explain and downplay his actions to the readers at the same time he was trying to explain it away to his wife. The author feels like a real person in all of his hypocrisy. He assaulted a young woman, but at the same time raised his daughter to be a feminist, tried to exemplify “good” masculinity to her (even if it’s mentioned that it’s more of an act for her sake rather than how he actually acts) and tries to protect her from men who are just like him.
There were so many different elements of craft within this short story and I think the most obvious one would be the fact that it is only 8 pages long. The short story, annunciation, that we read was notably much longer, being 20 pages when these short stories are typically around 15 pages. However, I feel like this one had just as much if not more depth to it, easily able to be a much longer story. I also found the narration really interesting. We were not told from the perspective of the cheating husband but from the POV of a narrator that was so closely following him that we are able to get the sense of how this cheater thinks and speaks. I feel like this short story could have easily fit into our Really Good Characters assignment, being someone who could be described as the worst person ever but they make for such a good character, showing their flaws and their mentality that is so much different than that of a typical, kind individual. There were times in the story where I swore that I was reading the cheaters mind directly, and not from another party so the use of this narration was interesting but still allowed us to fully grasp the cheater’s mentality. I also took note of how the way dialogue was presented had varying paragraph structures, depending on the importance of the conversation to the story. I feel as though the conversation between the cheater and his daughter was of the most importance in this story and that was obviously shown by the use of classic dialogue structure, spacing sentences out into different paragraphs with relatively short tags. This conversion was structured different than say the dialogue from the wife that found out about the adultery that occurred, where the few words that were quoted from the wife were combined into larger paragraphs. I think that choice really makes the reader focus on the conversation with the daughter rather than the wife. We are taken and it directly into the moment with the daughter, like we are observing the conversation from the room with them while it is happening With the wife and the cheaters conversation, we are just told what happened and that it did happen, making it feel like part of the background details that were needed before leading up to this confrontational moment with his daughter. I personally thought that the cheater was very contradicting in that he would preach to his daughter about the type of man she should have who is a good person and that she should be a feminist like he is (false) and he raised his daughter right. However, he then shrinks into a coward at the end who cannot admit to his daughter that he has gone and done the very things that he tells his daughter a true man would never do. The cheater is a very complex character who has done terrible things and is the absolute worst kind of person to exist, but makes for a great character because those types of characters gets the reader to flood with emotions (even though they are negative).
I can imagine what we’re going to discuss in class, but I wanted to talk about the narrator’s relationship with his daughter. A subtle, or between-the-lines aspect of the narrator’s character is that he’s worse than he thinks he is. He makes excuses for his behavior or chalks it up to the same type of thing as “boys will be boys” as though his actions aren’t really his fault, but more like he fell into them. However, he still knows what he does isn’t “right” or “good” in the eyes of general society, and so makes mention of how he tried to raise his daughter to be better than him. This is similar to the Wicked Good Characters assignment we did, as he isn’t good but still does something that makes him more complicated, more human. He raised her to be safe and responsible online and in real life, to support people who weren’t as privileged. He read her stories only written by women so she would have that perspective and know that she could write too when his favorite writers were all “secretly conservative” white men. The whole story is the narrator preparing to come clean to his daughter and by the time he does the reader knows how much he loves her, how much he cherishes her. The only problem is that it wasn’t enough to make him better, simply soften the blow when the truth came out.
I enjoyed how the scene opened with immediate action. The wife was upset, rightfully so, the tension of the moment was high and we were immediately pulled into the story. The emotions were also very well described to the point that the wife’s distress was practically palpable while reading that scene. Throughout this story, I found it both interesting and challenging to follow this narrator. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t likable. He was a villain with his crimes and his selfish ways of thinking coming to light as the story continued. However, he wasn’t one dimensional which made it easier to follow even during some of the moments in this story that many would consider difficult to read. He was a father and it sounded like he had a good relationship with his daughter, of whom his love for, was made very clear. This story was interesting in the sense that we got to see multiple sides of someone who if we didn’t get to see inside his head, we might write off as being purely a bad person. While I don’t think he is a good person at all, and I am angered by his actions and the way he tries to excuse them, he did have some goodness in him with how he loved his child. He was flawed, but also human. I found it to be a valuable challenge as both a reader and a writer to be inside his head. While I desperately wanted to hate him, and I wanted to say I didn’t like the story, because of the theme of his actions, the challenge was to look beyond that and admire the craft of this story. The piece was done very well. What really stood out to me in this piece was the writer’s ability to write such a complex character in a way that leads the reader on an emotional conflict of disliking this character, but also wanting to keep reading because the tension between good and evil, the empathy for the other characters involved, and the curiosity for how it was going to end, were done so well.
I really appreciated the length of this story. I feel the writer was able to catch a lot of tense emotion and concepts over as quickly as the wife and daughter in the story were about to get them. We are granted a glimpse into some of the backstory but never explicitly told all of it. We are given hints about what it was all about, we could feel the impending fallout. I quite appreciated how it presented how this man was quickly processing the reality he would have to face for the rest of his life or career. Quite an interesting take on writing a story that is compelling while being fairly minimal.
This was a very interesting short story to read. It started us right in the middle of chaos in this characters life, we just jumped straight into the action. But it didn’t feel like we were missing anything, we were given enough background that helped us understand what was going on. I really liked that this story, although it was short and there was definitely more that we could’ve seen within the world of this story. I thought that the detail that we were given, and the heartache that we felt from each of the characters was really well done. There was so much that showed how human these characters are and how they have had a human experience. But I also saw in this story how our main character was not the person that everyone in his family expected or thought of him to be. He kept making excuses for his actions, and the things he did to the women he had affairs with, but also how he was trying to make the audience feel like he was justified in his actions. The relationship that he portrays with his family just doesn’t seem like the real “him”. I think overall this story left me thinking. Thinking about what he has done that he hasn’t explained to us, or his family, and what he has actually done.
This story was an interesting read for me. I found myself often torn because the writing was good and I appreciated the skill of it, but the content was hard to get through and frankly, I had to put it down and try to read it again later. The way the story ended was really interesting; We’ve been spending a lot of time in class on stories with ending right before the big lead up of an event comes to fruition (in this story, the reveal of the article’s contents). I thought that the way the author characterizes the people in the story was really interesting. Particularly, I found myself almost sympathizing with the narrator despite them being a person I couldn’t like because of what they had done. The impact of the narrator’s actions on their life and success is almost pitiable, particularly when you consider the perspective of the wife and daughter who did nothing wrong but be associated with this guy. The way the author uses the internal monologue of the narrator to show his thought process and how he justifies his actions was really interesting to me.
This was a very interesting story to read. I was waiting for the narrator to really come to terms with the fact that he is evil but that realization never came. Having a non-reliable narrator seems to be a hard yet fun way of writing. The deluded air that the narrator has was what made this story the mist intriguing to me. Writing a character who is easy to love is kind of easy but writing a character who has more dimension than that is much harder. We are, of course, supposed to hate the narrator but the final scene when he was talking to his daughter made him seem ever so slightly human. He truly loved her, just in his own twisted way. The way he spoke of his daughter was at a surface level borderline toxic but if you really think about it his daughter was the single person he was terrified of losing. And in the end, he had lost her. He mentioned his final words to her, “Take care”. I think that was actually quite an effective ending. He can be minutely content with that final interaction, knowing that up until the final moment before the article was published, his daughter had loved him and he would eternally love her.
I would just like to start this journal off by saying that I hate the POV character, now with that out of the way, I think the POV character or narrator of this story is a very well written terrible person. I have met people in the past who say that “you can’t hate a character because of how they are written, that’s just they’re character.” I wholeheartedly disagree with that view point, because I think there are characters that are built and written to be hated, and there is nothing wrong with disliking a character that does bad things, like the narrator of this story. I think that the narrator is a very well written depiction of a misogynistic asshole, a plethora of which exist within the real world, he his a terrible person who does a lot of terrible things and has a lot of bad takes and worldviews, but I think that he is a very well written to be that, and it comes off very strongly and clearly. This man is a bad person, and I think he’s written very well to be that way.
I found this story hard to read, the story was very well written but its hard to like the character and the terrible things done it was difficult to read. I found the introduction of the story super interesting as it dives right into a conflict scene. Within the first page we get an are able to figure out the narrator is a bad person and different examples of things he did were explained. Following the narrators story towards the end my opinion changes a little towards him as we see he has a heart but must struggle with some sort of mental illness.
11 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 12”
This was a really interesting story to me as it took such a small moment and exploded it into extreme detail. It felt like the whole thing could’ve easily been a 5 minute scene if it were a film. Not only did this make it easy to follow but it forced the reader to be dropped into the middle of a scene. In only the first paragraph alone, imminent danger can be felt based on the descriptions of the narrator and the situation. It didn’t take a moment to set the stage rather than force the reader to be apart of it. Another element of the story that stuck out to me was how the narrator was a “bad but human” character. Yes, he sounds like an asshole, but he was still written to be a human being. This image was evident in the descriptors of his anxiety and the desire to preserve his relationship with his daughter. Although it doesn’t redeem his behavior, he even admits his faults. The author’s choice in painting him as human made his character feel real and believable. It also added a layer of complexity to the situation that allowed for a look behind the curtain into the narrators mind.
This story definitely stood out to me from the others we’ve read so far – I think this is due in part to in being shorter than the others we’ve read and also how contained it is. I liked how this story tackled a single event in the authors life rather than attempting to cover all of the events leading up to now. As the story went on the evidence against the author became more and more incriminating, which I think served the story excellently as it was from his point of view and it felt like he was trying to explain and downplay his actions to the readers at the same time he was trying to explain it away to his wife. The author feels like a real person in all of his hypocrisy. He assaulted a young woman, but at the same time raised his daughter to be a feminist, tried to exemplify “good” masculinity to her (even if it’s mentioned that it’s more of an act for her sake rather than how he actually acts) and tries to protect her from men who are just like him.
There were so many different elements of craft within this short story and I think the most obvious one would be the fact that it is only 8 pages long. The short story, annunciation, that we read was notably much longer, being 20 pages when these short stories are typically around 15 pages. However, I feel like this one had just as much if not more depth to it, easily able to be a much longer story. I also found the narration really interesting. We were not told from the perspective of the cheating husband but from the POV of a narrator that was so closely following him that we are able to get the sense of how this cheater thinks and speaks. I feel like this short story could have easily fit into our Really Good Characters assignment, being someone who could be described as the worst person ever but they make for such a good character, showing their flaws and their mentality that is so much different than that of a typical, kind individual. There were times in the story where I swore that I was reading the cheaters mind directly, and not from another party so the use of this narration was interesting but still allowed us to fully grasp the cheater’s mentality. I also took note of how the way dialogue was presented had varying paragraph structures, depending on the importance of the conversation to the story. I feel as though the conversation between the cheater and his daughter was of the most importance in this story and that was obviously shown by the use of classic dialogue structure, spacing sentences out into different paragraphs with relatively short tags. This conversion was structured different than say the dialogue from the wife that found out about the adultery that occurred, where the few words that were quoted from the wife were combined into larger paragraphs. I think that choice really makes the reader focus on the conversation with the daughter rather than the wife. We are taken and it directly into the moment with the daughter, like we are observing the conversation from the room with them while it is happening With the wife and the cheaters conversation, we are just told what happened and that it did happen, making it feel like part of the background details that were needed before leading up to this confrontational moment with his daughter. I personally thought that the cheater was very contradicting in that he would preach to his daughter about the type of man she should have who is a good person and that she should be a feminist like he is (false) and he raised his daughter right. However, he then shrinks into a coward at the end who cannot admit to his daughter that he has gone and done the very things that he tells his daughter a true man would never do. The cheater is a very complex character who has done terrible things and is the absolute worst kind of person to exist, but makes for a great character because those types of characters gets the reader to flood with emotions (even though they are negative).
I can imagine what we’re going to discuss in class, but I wanted to talk about the narrator’s relationship with his daughter. A subtle, or between-the-lines aspect of the narrator’s character is that he’s worse than he thinks he is. He makes excuses for his behavior or chalks it up to the same type of thing as “boys will be boys” as though his actions aren’t really his fault, but more like he fell into them. However, he still knows what he does isn’t “right” or “good” in the eyes of general society, and so makes mention of how he tried to raise his daughter to be better than him. This is similar to the Wicked Good Characters assignment we did, as he isn’t good but still does something that makes him more complicated, more human. He raised her to be safe and responsible online and in real life, to support people who weren’t as privileged. He read her stories only written by women so she would have that perspective and know that she could write too when his favorite writers were all “secretly conservative” white men. The whole story is the narrator preparing to come clean to his daughter and by the time he does the reader knows how much he loves her, how much he cherishes her. The only problem is that it wasn’t enough to make him better, simply soften the blow when the truth came out.
I enjoyed how the scene opened with immediate action. The wife was upset, rightfully so, the tension of the moment was high and we were immediately pulled into the story. The emotions were also very well described to the point that the wife’s distress was practically palpable while reading that scene. Throughout this story, I found it both interesting and challenging to follow this narrator. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t likable. He was a villain with his crimes and his selfish ways of thinking coming to light as the story continued. However, he wasn’t one dimensional which made it easier to follow even during some of the moments in this story that many would consider difficult to read. He was a father and it sounded like he had a good relationship with his daughter, of whom his love for, was made very clear. This story was interesting in the sense that we got to see multiple sides of someone who if we didn’t get to see inside his head, we might write off as being purely a bad person. While I don’t think he is a good person at all, and I am angered by his actions and the way he tries to excuse them, he did have some goodness in him with how he loved his child. He was flawed, but also human. I found it to be a valuable challenge as both a reader and a writer to be inside his head. While I desperately wanted to hate him, and I wanted to say I didn’t like the story, because of the theme of his actions, the challenge was to look beyond that and admire the craft of this story. The piece was done very well. What really stood out to me in this piece was the writer’s ability to write such a complex character in a way that leads the reader on an emotional conflict of disliking this character, but also wanting to keep reading because the tension between good and evil, the empathy for the other characters involved, and the curiosity for how it was going to end, were done so well.
I really appreciated the length of this story. I feel the writer was able to catch a lot of tense emotion and concepts over as quickly as the wife and daughter in the story were about to get them. We are granted a glimpse into some of the backstory but never explicitly told all of it. We are given hints about what it was all about, we could feel the impending fallout. I quite appreciated how it presented how this man was quickly processing the reality he would have to face for the rest of his life or career. Quite an interesting take on writing a story that is compelling while being fairly minimal.
This was a very interesting short story to read. It started us right in the middle of chaos in this characters life, we just jumped straight into the action. But it didn’t feel like we were missing anything, we were given enough background that helped us understand what was going on. I really liked that this story, although it was short and there was definitely more that we could’ve seen within the world of this story. I thought that the detail that we were given, and the heartache that we felt from each of the characters was really well done. There was so much that showed how human these characters are and how they have had a human experience. But I also saw in this story how our main character was not the person that everyone in his family expected or thought of him to be. He kept making excuses for his actions, and the things he did to the women he had affairs with, but also how he was trying to make the audience feel like he was justified in his actions. The relationship that he portrays with his family just doesn’t seem like the real “him”. I think overall this story left me thinking. Thinking about what he has done that he hasn’t explained to us, or his family, and what he has actually done.
This story was an interesting read for me. I found myself often torn because the writing was good and I appreciated the skill of it, but the content was hard to get through and frankly, I had to put it down and try to read it again later. The way the story ended was really interesting; We’ve been spending a lot of time in class on stories with ending right before the big lead up of an event comes to fruition (in this story, the reveal of the article’s contents). I thought that the way the author characterizes the people in the story was really interesting. Particularly, I found myself almost sympathizing with the narrator despite them being a person I couldn’t like because of what they had done. The impact of the narrator’s actions on their life and success is almost pitiable, particularly when you consider the perspective of the wife and daughter who did nothing wrong but be associated with this guy. The way the author uses the internal monologue of the narrator to show his thought process and how he justifies his actions was really interesting to me.
This was a very interesting story to read. I was waiting for the narrator to really come to terms with the fact that he is evil but that realization never came. Having a non-reliable narrator seems to be a hard yet fun way of writing. The deluded air that the narrator has was what made this story the mist intriguing to me. Writing a character who is easy to love is kind of easy but writing a character who has more dimension than that is much harder. We are, of course, supposed to hate the narrator but the final scene when he was talking to his daughter made him seem ever so slightly human. He truly loved her, just in his own twisted way. The way he spoke of his daughter was at a surface level borderline toxic but if you really think about it his daughter was the single person he was terrified of losing. And in the end, he had lost her. He mentioned his final words to her, “Take care”. I think that was actually quite an effective ending. He can be minutely content with that final interaction, knowing that up until the final moment before the article was published, his daughter had loved him and he would eternally love her.
I would just like to start this journal off by saying that I hate the POV character, now with that out of the way, I think the POV character or narrator of this story is a very well written terrible person. I have met people in the past who say that “you can’t hate a character because of how they are written, that’s just they’re character.” I wholeheartedly disagree with that view point, because I think there are characters that are built and written to be hated, and there is nothing wrong with disliking a character that does bad things, like the narrator of this story. I think that the narrator is a very well written depiction of a misogynistic asshole, a plethora of which exist within the real world, he his a terrible person who does a lot of terrible things and has a lot of bad takes and worldviews, but I think that he is a very well written to be that, and it comes off very strongly and clearly. This man is a bad person, and I think he’s written very well to be that way.
I found this story hard to read, the story was very well written but its hard to like the character and the terrible things done it was difficult to read. I found the introduction of the story super interesting as it dives right into a conflict scene. Within the first page we get an are able to figure out the narrator is a bad person and different examples of things he did were explained. Following the narrators story towards the end my opinion changes a little towards him as we see he has a heart but must struggle with some sort of mental illness.