Week 4 Responses

The developing character in McKittrick’s “A Friendly Dissertation”

I loved reading this piece. It was very interesting to read a story in which a character changes so quickly but convincingly. The main character goes from a seemingly self-confident, condescending young man to a disturbed character. We don’t really learn much about Speedy besides his appearance and the fact that the speaker considers him a crappy writer, but that’s not what we care about. What we care about is how the main character reacts to the crappy stories. They really change him. His reactions to Speedy’s stories tell us so much more about the character than he can tell us by himself.

What makes this story so effective is the narration from the middle of page 2 onward. Quite unfortunately, considering the excellence of the narration before this point, the character’s voice doesn’t really shine through until the line “this was a sort of tradition” (McKittrick 2). The narrative voice completely changes from someone dealing in geometry and metaphor to the voice of a teenage boy. We really need to see less of a drastic change from scene to scene. This will make his change at the end of the story more effective.

The rumor mill in Semonchik’s “The Soap Seller”

The wonderful thing about “The Soap Seller” is the fact that the narrative voice perfectly reflects an old woman gossiping nostalgically. The scene on pages 3-5 in which the grandmother relates the tale of Taavi held me captive like the latest story at the lunch table. Occasional interjections of opinion and hindsight happen just often enough to be believable. I want to meet the grandmother and talk with her about Taavi and her aunt Jonna. The story of Jonna’s pregnancy was really intriguing, especially the ending in which we find out the word for “soap seller” is the same backwards and forwards. Great little wordplay there. The voice could use a little more consistency during this part of the story, but it’s overall pretty good.

However, I was talking with someone earlier and he pointed out that the original narrator of the story never comes back. This led me to wonder, what is her purpose at the beginning of the story? She sets up the grandmother’s tales, but doesn’t reflect on them or talk about them with her grandmother. Will we see a return when the story is edited? It would tie the beginning with the end rather nicely, and this seems like a piece that needs a clean ending.