Tall Girl, Short Stories

Most of Salinger’s stories that we've read in class focused on the relationship between children and adults and how the presence of children creates a comfortable environment for adults to let their guard down and show their soft side. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a good example of this. If we judge Seymour solely based on the bits of the story that didn't include Sybil, we can conclude he's kind of a kooky person. Muriel and her mom’s conversation set up the possibility that perhaps he isn't quite right in the head, whether or not you choose to believe the mom’s persistent hints that Seymour’s a lil crazy. Later, during the only scene that depicts him interacting with another adult, Seymour makes a random paranoid comment about the woman looking at his feet. This interaction is definitely weird, but maybe Seymour just wins the award for most awkward person of the year? I’ve been there, I can’t judge. By the end of the story, though, there's no d

I really enjoyed Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried . Or, at least, I really wanted to. There was a consensus in our class of feeling hurt and betrayed by the almost-nonfiction narrative O'Brien delivers. I guess I'm part of the mob. I'm mad at O'Brien, too. I'm not mad that he fudged the truth of his Vietnam experiences in a book of fiction. In almost every story, he tells us that we aren't reading factual information. What I'm mad about is that he didn't stick to the whole meaning of war stories that was pushed throughout the book. O'Brien's Basic War Story consists of who, where, and what The Narrator saw. Usually, readers are left to figure out the meaning, if there was one at all. In "Spin," we are told that "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end." These stories aren't supposed to have a structure. They're just moments. Memories. The narrator