Red Sky in the Morning - Reading Response 4

Even after reading and re-reading the piece, I feel as though it’s missing something. The story is deftly placed immediately following the three concepts of story which Burroway presents: story as a Journey, as a power struggle, and connection and disconnection. Red Sky in the Morning definitely has elements of all three. Quite literally, the protagonist makes her way across a landscape in a dingy Greyhound bus (on her way to visit her imprisoned Che Guevarra clone). The power struggle and connection/disconnection both take place within the protagonists mind, as she wallows through the murk of self-examination, and ultimately finds her own life lacking in comparison to the middle-aged woman’s marriage to a young exuberant youth. She shows change by the end of the story as she remarks of how often she recalls the experience and reflects on the fact that of the two, she finds the older woman more compelling somehow.

What struck me as odd and somehow out of place was the title and references throughout. It would have been fitting to another story, I think. The untold story that the protagonist could have shared but didn’t about how her boyfriend ended up in prison, and how she came to be on the bus trip to see him. The allusion to a nation at war with itself also was perhaps worthy of such a foreboding. The story she chose to tell was one of love, and the omen of bad things to come seemed out of place in the telling.