Week 8: Reading Response

I absolutely love short stories. When you’re limited on time and you don’t have weeks or months to devote to a book, short stories become a very viable option. I can’t think of many short stories that I’ve read so this week’s assigned readings were a refresher. When you have a short story, there’s got to be a story but I guess it’s condensed. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” it appears to be more of a scene rather than a story. As the reader, I didn’t know who the girl was or why she was drinking alcohol with an older man. Could this man be her lover? It was strange and the story didn’t give any information. I could tell there was a greater meaning to the story but I was unable to figure it out. “San Francisco” was by far the most confusing out of the three short stories. In fact “San Francisco” was the shortest. It contained mostly dialogue but again I couldn’t decipher what the meaning was. It jumped around where I didn’t know if it was the same scene or a different one. My favorite story was “Coping Stones.” There were moments I was laughing out loud in tears. There’s this girl that comes to the doctor’s door and basically asks him to help her out with her relationship with Matt, the doctor’s tenant. His bluntness is overwhelmingly funny as he tries to get her out of his house so he can eat his dinner. There were many slow points throughout the story where I’m just like “hurry up and get to the point” but it was still pretty funny. In this story, I saw flashback mechanics which were integrated seamlessly as well as good summary and plot points.