Jennaralee Concerned about Short Stories

When we were reading the story, "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona", I was a bit confused as to why the title was what it was. I understood that it was an important place for the main characters, as it was where Victor's father was and where they traveled to together and bonded over, but I didn't understand the first part: "This is what it means to Say"? It felt a little awkward, and slightly confusing. So, I've decided that I, an 18 year old girl with all the authority in the world, would re-title this story to a simple "Brotherhood". I think this is a pretty apt title if I do say so myself. The reason I want this to be the title is because I feel like bonds are a really important part of the story. There's this superficial kind of bond that Victor has to the rest of the tribe, which can be seen at the beginning with his encounter with the council. They seem to be looking at his situation very logically, lacking empathy for wh

To me, the story "Evolution of My Brother" is a sort of coming of age story, but with two characters in focus instead of just one. It's almost about how they come of age together, though the siblings are quite far apart in age and logically one should come of age before the other. One of the motifs I felt were especially played out in this story was that of regret. Almost every time the narrator spoke from her perspective in the future, it sounded like she had regret or remorse for her actions in the past. Her words felt like explanations and please for understanding and forgiveness. However, there was one part that I felt the regret not from the narrator of the future, but of the Jenny of the past, and that is on page 159, where she is trying to stop her brother from coming in, and then locks him out of her room. The first part of this section reads "I took my slipper and whacked the tips of his fingers like he was a bug" (159). This is her immediate reaction

"They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage,the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility" page 259 from "The Things They Carried" "The Things They Carried" was an absolutely devastating story to me. The way that it portrayed the life of a soldier and the struggle to keep one's humanity for such a long time was really poignant. The sentence above that I chose from the story really encapsulates this feeling of the fading humanity of the soldiers in my opinion. It shows the slow, meth

I believe that Matthews’ definition of the short story - "A short story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation" - is a little too narrow. Largely, it feels like he made the assumption that because a short story is short, it can only deal with one of each element a story has. While it’s true that short stories often work with less than a novel would have in terms of characters, settings, actions, and emotions, it does not mean that the short story is so limited as to only be able to deal with one of each. Perhaps a single focus or message, but certainly not with individual elements. My biggest complaint with the restraints of this definition is the rigidity of the phrase “deals with a single character”. The main antithesis to this that we have read so far is “The Machine Stops”. This may not be an obvious choice, but allow me to explain. “The Machine Stops” relies on the fact that there ar