The Drunkard

"The Drunkard" by Frank O'Connor

"'My brave little man!' she said with her eyes shining. 'It was God did it you were there. You were his guardian angel'" (O'Connor, page 351).

The first piece of the story that caught my attention was the separation between Mr. Dooley and the father. Although they were from different classes of the society they lived in, both Mr. Dooley and the father were able to get to know each other personally. I was confused though when Father did not want to go to Dooley's funeral. When he got there though, a man who did not know Dooley was there yet Father did not want to come there at all even though he was friends with Dooley. Another disturbing and confusing action of the story came with Father's work. Father did not want to miss half a day of work to go to Dooley's funeral yet was fine getting drunk the night before work and not going to work. The ethics of Father perplexed me in many of the descisions but specifically his differing opinion about skipping work. Another thing I noticed with the story was the focus of the society. It was fine for Father to be drunk and skip work. When the son got drunk, all the attention shot on him when it was really his father's fault. Like in our society, things seem to go unnoticed when an adult does it but if a child does the same thing, more attention is placed on them rather the adult. Just like the attention being on the child, the title seems to display the direct attention to the child rather than the father. 

Once Upon a Time

"Once Upon a Time" by Nadine Gordiner

"Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining colied tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in, and with the first fixing of its razorteeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed and struggled deeper into its tangle" (Gordiner, page 236).

Shifts of emotion and atmosphere occur throughout the parts of this short story. The first emotion came in the first paragraph of the story. The emotion of a predisposed superiority came through from the narrator's diction. Following the first paragraph, the snippet before the beginning of the story of the family created an emotion with suspense. The atmosphere left me feeling that it was a nightmare of the narrator. Furthermore, as the story progressed into the story of the family, atmosphere changes began to come about more severely. The first atmosphere of the nearly perfect family in a perfect society placed a happy, perfect atmopshere. When the mention of the people trying to get in and the son finding interest in the gate speaker, I began to notice a shift of the atmosphere of an erie, futurisitc atmosphere marked by the separation of the classes that reminds me of many different sci-fi movies. As the families became more and more protected, the atmosphere became more and more dark until the boy decides to attempt to be brave and escape. The overall atmosphere of the story was that of perfection not being perfect and the flaws put in by attempts to be perfect.