Matthias' take on...

"The Story of a Hour" by Kate Chopin
"A&P" by John Updike and
"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

Before I go further, I'm just going to make it clear that I know I've been lax in putting stuff up here. I mean, I really don't have an excuse because I know how there's nothing else taking up my time at all... Anyway, point is, I'll try to get this stuff up faster.

"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin

This was an interesting curio of a short story. Structurally, it was very tight. The reason I bring up tightness is that film is a major interest of mine, I mean... I really like looking into films, and reading some of my favorite screenplays. Anyway, I bring up tightness and structure because a good screenplay, in its written form, must be as tight and as well structured as possible, both to save onscreen time, but also so that all the events in the film make some sort of narrative sense. Anyway, "The Story of an Hour" is a really good example of economy of prose. However, I felt that with such compression of prose dampens the emotional effect that the events of the story have. It also makes it more difficult to give the emotional linger typically associated with moments of gravity within a story. If less time is spent on something, the dramatic effect is usually lessened. But anyway, I'm speaking like I'm giving a Robert McKee seminar... As far how it made me feel, I gotta say... I didn't feel that much emotion coming off of the page. Granted part of it is the way in which it was presented, but I think that because I've never really been overwhelmed by happiness (or sadness for that matter) that I couldn't feel the way the protagonist feels, and so there was, for me, a certain emotional detachment.

"A & P" by John Updike

Good stuff. It's a cool example of what the expansion of what would (real time) be no more than twenty minutes with impersonal, informal semi-stream of consciousness prose. If it were at almost any other time of day, and/or any other period in this Sammy kid's life, then Updike wouldn't have the liberty of expounding upon what's running through Sammy's head. What I liked most about it was that the story lacks the feeling of being written. There aren't any overt metaphors, an obvious dramatic foil, hell, there isn't even some sort of improbable action as the crux of the story: it's about a kid who quits his job. In distancing the story from the overtly literary, the characters and setting feels closer: you've been in the grocery store with some teenage kid ringing you up plenty of times. This gives Updike the freedom that he only has to observe the settings, and characters, etc... from the perspective of this nineteen-year old Sammy, instead of actually writing them. However, that isn't to say that it's no less thematic. I thought that the best thing that Updike did in this story was that he was able to weave the collusion of things (Sammy's co-worker, "queenie"'s attitude about the girls' attire, Sammy's Manager, etc...) into this defining moment in Sammy's life, hence the expansion of themes at the very end: "...I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter," and to do it all so naturally. (Okay, I know that was a really poorly-written sentence, but I'm quite tired, so I'll fix it later... maybe ;)

"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

A fascinating short story. There is almost a ton of thematic opportunity that war provides writers (cf. All Quiet on the Western Front, The Best Years of Their Lives, Paths of Glory, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan, etc... and that's only films), and so it's quite apt that O'Brien is able to (I don't want to say "pile"...) many themes upon one another (Jimmy Cross, prose techniques regarding the Everyman in war, etc...) . However, as I wrote in my essay, the one that I found most interesting was the idea of the Platoon of the Everyman vs. the Collective Platoon, i.e. the group versus the individual. Such a comparison, and by extension conflict, is often forced upon the individual soldier (Charlie Sheen's character in Platoon, wherein he is forced to choose between two completely different ideologies personified in the two different sergeants played by Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger, each representing the ideas of the preservation of individual freedom as a soldier in war, and yielding to the collective for the benefit of all others and winning the war, respectively). This theme is best explored in, what I consider to be, one of the best of all war films, The Thin Red Line written/directed by Terrence Malick. There are quite a few obvious parallels between both "The Things They Carried" and The Thin Red Line, primarily the narrative structure of both: they both primarily focus on a particular soldier at any one time. In doing so, they both create the effect of studying the the Everyman in war, personified in some way by each member of the platoon. Granted every war film necessarily does this (you can't have a platoon of the same guy twelve times), but of the works I've seen, "The Things They Carried" and The Thin Red Line are the only two whose primary aim is to do a character study set during war.