Though I like poetry, I have to say I’m pretty thoroughly a short story fan, so this week’s readings were really interesting and very enjoyable to me. I especially liked the Hemingway one, “Hills Like White Elephants.” I’ve read this story before, but rereading it after the Burroway reading gave me a new perspective on it, and this time through I really appreciated the way that he created so much out of so little. By this, I mean he used almost entirely dialogue- and vague dialogue at that- and yet still produced an enthralling, meaningful, and well-flowing story. I also liked that the topic of the story, the woman being pregnant and the man urging for surgery to ‘fix’ it, was given so subtly; it is never once directly stated, the reader has to interpret it and pull it out from the text. This is very hard to do successfully, and I think I might attempt it in this week’s writing assignment, if for no other reason than to get an appreciation of just how hard it is. He provided ample character description, great imagery, and complex drama all through simple lines of dialogue and a few lines of description, and that really inspired me to challenge myself in my own writing.
I literally had no clue that the story was about pregnancy until I read this. Thank you for that Jordan, because the story was confusing to say the least.
ReplyDeleteBut I like how it was written in a way that made it able to derive the context of the dialogue from the very dialogue itself. It didn't really happen to me, but I guess for the more analytic reader, it comes across more gracefully. Also, the female protagonist was drinking while pregnant. Irresponsible.