"The Lottery"

Before reading this story, I tried to think of the connotation of the actual word lottery. I think of the possibility of winning money, and all the good things that come along with that. But there is also a negative connotation to the lottery, which is addiction, and habit which people sometimes have towards the lottery. For the most part though, I associate the lottery for being something good and fun. In Shirley Jackson gives the idea of "The Lottery" a whole different meaning. I thought maybe I would be reading a story about someone coming into money and everything that they did with it. The way the story opens also led me to believe it would be a happy story or a story with a good ending. The story opens with, "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green" (Jackson 562). That first sentence alone changed the way I saw the whole story.
It was like any other day in the village, and these village people had no problem taking an innocent persons life for no reason at all. The story spoke so much about how evil natured people can be sometimes, for no reason at all, or to simply be following tradition. This story scared me in that the people seemed as if nothing was wrong with the lottery. "The lottery was conducted-as were the square dances, the teenage club, the Halloween program-by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities" (Jackson 562). The phrase "civic activities," also made me cringe. How could these people come to believe this lottery was a part of their civic duty? This is a truly disturbing story I think, and it was almost hard for me to read. The way the people in the village just seemed to do whatever Mr. Summers asked, and singing a song every year, doing a ritual salute for Mr. Summers, it made me think of the way Adolf Hitler made people so brainwashed during the Holocaust. It is scary to think how we as humans might react in these situations, and it takes a story like this to show how human nature sometimes changes for the bad. I think Shirley Jackson ended this story just right by having Mrs. Hutchinson say, "It isn't fair, it isn't right" (Jackson 567).

"Hills Like White Elephants"

"The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white" (Hemingway 552). Hemingway opens his story, "Hills Like White Elephants," by keeper the reader at a distance from the characters and the action. The story takes place in northern Spain, near a river. As I read the story, I almost felt like I was watching what was going on from a very far distance. Hemingway also kept me distant from the characters since he does not give us much information about them. "The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building" (Hemingway 552). This is really the only description that Hemingway gives of the protagonists in the story. Later on in the story, the American calls the girl, Jig, and so we learn her name and that is it. Everything else that is learned about the American and Jig is simply through their dialogue. I enjoyed the way Hemingway wrote this short story because all the character information is not laid out for the reader to see, you almost have to imagine the characters looks, thoughts, and feelings through their conversation. As I continued to read the story it seemed to me as though the American is trying to persuade Jig to do something that she clearly is not comfortable doing. "I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in" (Hemingway 553). I took this statement by the American as though he is trying to control Jig's actions pretending as he already knows that she "wouldn't mind it." The American tries to convince Jig that if she has an abortion everything will be fine and things will go back to normal, but Jig knows there is consequences to doing it.
Jig tells the American that "Once they take it away, you never get it back" (Hemingway 554). It seems as though Jig will do anything to please the American, and she will most likely give up the baby because of his persuasion. I found this story to be interesting in that all the details our given up throughout the dialogue in this story.

"The Young Goodman Brown"

I think the names that Nathaniel Brown chose for the protagonists was the most important part of "Young Goodman Brown." It definitely led me into the story feeling a certain way about each character. It seemed at first glance that Goodman Brown was just that, a "good man." I wondered if Goodman was actual his first name, or if it was a nickname given to him by the town. But what was it that drew him into the woods into the night, where the witches are? What would cause him to stray away from his loving wife? Goodman Browns wife's name is Faith. "And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons on her cap while she called to Goodman Brown" (Hawthorne 539). I believe the name Faith was fitted for Goodman Brown because it seemed as though his faith was what he was trying to hold onto in the story. Faith symbolized everything that Goodman Brown was before he entered the forest. He was a good, loving, and faithful husband, but some other force had led him into the forest and he could not figure out why. I liked the way Hawthorne used the wife to represent the reasons that Goodman went into the Forest. When he is approached in the gloomy forest and asked why he took so long, Goodman Brown simply replied, "Faith kept me back a while" (Hawthorne 540). Any other name would not lead me to believe that Goodman was questioning his own beliefs, but Faith had to mean something. As Hawthorne says, the name was "aptly" chosen, and I can see why in this story.

"The Yellow Wallpaper"

"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlette Perkins Gilman was to me a sad story of a woman trapped inside her own home. She seemed to be severely depressed and no one could figure out why. Her husband continually tells her that there is nothing wrong with her and no one can fix it but herself. She speaks of how her, "Nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing" (Gilman 489). Throughout the story I was trying to figure it exactly what is wrong with the narrator. There are many times when she calls her problem a "nervous condition." I tried to come up with a couple of possibilities for why she may be feeling so depressed, left feeling trapped with only the yellow wallpaper acting as almost a character in the story. The narrator speaks about recently having a baby and says that she wishes she can be with him, saying, "And yet, I can not be with him, it makes me so nervous"(Gilman 489). I wondered if maybe she was suffering from post pardom depression which was making her act the way she is. The narrator says she, "Cries at nothing, and cry most of the time" (Gilman 491). The narrator also mentioned that she only cries when she is alone, which means that she is trying to hide her sadness from her husband and anyone else around her, leading them to believe there is really nothing wrong with her. I also felt that her husband, John, seemed to treat her as if she is a child. When the narrator woke him up to talk one night he said to her, "What is it little girl?" (Gilman 493). I took that statement as if John might not treat his wife with respect, he treats her as if she is a child. He may even feel that she is making up that there is something really wrong with her. She pleads to John that she is not getting any better and his response is simply, "Bless her little heart!" (Gilman 493). I think her husbands treatment of her played some sort of role in whatever condition she had. Lastly, I desperately wanted to know what the significance of the Yellow Wallpaper is. I think it has many meanings, and I plan on reading the story over to see if there was anything I missed regarding both the color yellow and the wallpaper itself. Before reading the story, I tried to think of all the things that I associate with the color yellow. My room is yellow, I thought of the sun, and mostly all things that certainly would not lead anyone to be depressed. After reading the story, for some reason I had the vision that yellow could somehow be a depressing color depending on how you look at it. I thought of jaundice, which is a yellow condition of the skin, and wondered if that had any connection to the story, although I did not see it included in it. I also wondered why Gilman decided to base a story around a woman who felt trapped in a room of wallpaper. What does wallpaper itself symbolize? Having recently stripped wallpaper with my mother, since my father did not know how to do it, I began wondering if it is a "women's job?" Did the narrator feel trapped inside a feminine room? Maybe she felt trapped inside her marriage, which is symbolized in the room she was in. The story left me with many questions, and I think I will read it again for hints into why the narrator was feeling the was she was.

"A Rose for Emily"

William Faulkner's, "A Rose for Emily," is my favorite story so far this semester. I loved the way Faulkner uses the theme of death throughout the entire story to foreshadow the eerie ending. Miss Emily Grierson's denial of death is also shown throughout the story, helping the reader to better understand why she left her sweethearts decaying body live with her for all those years. Even in the opening sentence we are introduced to the idea of death. "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral" (Faulker 404). Right away it hit me, this story is going to have the idea of death throughout it. Faulkner then explained the house that Emily had lived in, with "Stubborn and coquettish decay" (Faulkner 404). I loved the way Faulkner was able to describe the once beautiful house, that was now decaying as if it were dead. Emily is treated very differently in the town because of her social status, and the townspeople do little about her house rotting away.
Faulkner even speaks of Emily when she was living as if she was dead. "Her skeleton was small and spare" (Faulkner 404). In nearly ever paragraph, Faulkner brings in the idea of death to help the reader better understand the eerie ending. Even when the townspeople worried about a "smell" that was coming from the house, they would not dare ask Emily about it. They decided to send some people over to the house to spread some lime around the outside to help the smell go away. I associated the smell with that of death and decay. Even as they went to Miss Emily's house, she was seen sitting in a chair with her, " upright torso motionless" (Faulkner 406). I loved the way Faulkner slipped these words into the story, and I tried to note each time he brought them up.
Once Emily's father had died, she had a very hard time accepting his death and would not let him be buried for three days. This was the start of Emily's denial of reality. She had a very hard time facing the reality that her father had passed on. This idea leads the story into the tragic death of Homer Barron, who Emily ending up poisoning. The two were unlikely pair, since Homer was a Northerner, and a day laborer. I believed that since Emily could not convince Homer to marry her that she had decided to poison him to keep them together. Since maybe Emily would never get the "Til death do us part" with Homer, she would make it happen for herself. Emily obviously had a hard time with letting go of the ones she loved, and this is seen throughout the story. Ironically, death was what separated Homer and Emily, but it also kept them together at the same time. I really enjoyed the way Faulkner wrote this story, and enjoyed reading it.