Short Fiction Essay

Fiction has many elements such as point of view, character, theme, and plot. No matter what point of view the story is told or how the story is plotted a character must go through some sort of change. While the character may not change in the story, they may goes through an experience which leads the reader to imagine how that experience may have changed that character. Two of the stories I want to focus on are “The Fat Girl” and “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”

“The Fat Girl” revolves around a girl named Louise who was, just as the title implies, a fat girl.. Her mother would limit her to a diet, telling her that if she is not skinny the boys will not like her. At night, when her mother was sleeping she would snack on just about anything she could get her hands on. To everyone else she was just a girl who was destined to be fat. But as the story quotes, “No one saw the store of Milky Ways, Butterfingers, Almond Joys, and Hersheys far back on her closet shelf, behind the stuffed animals of her childhood.” (pg. 127)

Louise heads off to college and meets a friend named Carrie. Carrie helps her diet and over the course of a year Louise goes from 184 to 136 pounds. She a skinny and beautiful and eats a very healthy, lean diet. She meets a man named Richard and they eventually get married. Richard is a tall, handsome man, someone Louise would have never imagined being with. Louise becomes pregnant and during her pregnancy, she begins to go back to her old eating habits. She would hide snacks in a secret place and eat when no one was watching. While convinced it’s just the baby fat, Richard becomes concerned that it’s not just water weight, but straight fat and tells her to cut down on her eating which Louise resents him for.

After having the child Louise has trouble getting back to the skinny figure she had prior having the baby. Richard becomes less affectionate, almost bitter towards her. He was no longer attracted to her. When she claims he never touches her, he comes back, “I don’t want to touch you. Why should I? Have you looked at yourself? (pg. 138) After a few fights, he tells her that he still loves her and will diet with her. However she doesn’t believe him. She expects that after she puts her baby to sleep Richard will have left the house and left her for good so she grabs a candy bar from her stash and heads downstairs. The problem is, she finds Richard still standing there and she is caught. The story ends there, leaving the reader to wonder how Louise may have changed after finally being caught. The story would have lost anyone’s attention if she was fat the whole story.

“Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” is about a rebellious teenage girl named Connie who thinks she is on top of the world. Her sister was a plain girl who was older and helped her mother, had a job, and saved money. Her sister’s mind wasn’t, “filled with trashy daydreams.” (pg. 348) She took advantage of her mother’s naïve thought that Connie lived the same teenage life as her plain, steady sister. When Connie was dropped off at the mall to catch a movie with her friends, they would sneak across the highway to a plaza where the older kid’s hung out. They would meet older boys of whom Connie would day dream about the next day. Connie would return to the mall when she was being picked up and all her mother would ask was how the movie was.

One Sunday, Connie’s family was going to a barbeque. When asked to go, Connie roller her eyes at her mother who was quick to let her stay home alone. A man that she saw one night at the plaza had come to her house. At first it seems like a something out of a cute love story and Connie plays along, being complete ignorant to the fact that this older man was a dangerous stalker. After some innocent flirting, Connie realizes that this man was not ready to leave without her and she becomes scared for herself. She threatens to call the police and the man, who called himself Arnold Friend, says that he will break his promise not to come into the house if she touches the phone. She runs to the phone and Arnold comes in. He grabs her and makes her hang up the phone and brings her to his, to a place where she had never been before and describes as “so much land that she had never seen before.”

The story ends, and the read never knows what happened to Connie. In the event that she even survives the event, one may think that this experience changes her from the rebellious teen to one more like her sister. Hopefully she would start to hope that her mother might her more questions, and be a little more concerned with the activities that she up to. Whether or not Connie became a more obedient teen or not, or if Louise stayed a fat girl that she was, these stories would have no substance if these characters didn’t go through the attitude or habit changing events that they experienced.

Works Cited

Dubus, Andre. "The Fat Girl." The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. Ed. Tobias Wolff. New York: Vintage, 1994. 125-40. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. Ed. Tobias Wolff. New York: Vintage, 1994. 347-65. Print.

The Things They Carried

This is sort of a sad but hopeful story about men in at war and they things they carried on them, both physically and mentally. Some of these things were necessities, others were for luck, and some were to remind them of someone at home or someone they loved. The author explains in great detail what each man carried and you can almost feel the weight of it all.

The author sets a very serious tone for the story, told from a third person view as the author uses "they" throughout the story. He mentions death and how everything can change in an instant while at war. The things that each man carried were something to get them through this tough time at war. The story is sort of eerie as you never quite know whats going to happen next, just like at war.

Testimony of Pilot

The main character of the story is a man named William who also narrates the story. He and buddy, Radcleve, were playing with m-80s one day and ended up throwing one too close to the other main character, Quadberry. Quadberry did not speak to them until the end of high school. Towards the end up high school Quadberry began playing saxaphone for the school band which William had been paying in for years prior. Quadberry was a weird kid who usually got made funny of, with kids calling him names like "Queerberry." One day though, Quadberry ends up astonishing a crown with the way he played the saxophone and him and William end up becoming good friends.

College ended up separating the two friends, however. However years later they see eachother again but everything was different then the last time they saw each other. Neither of them played music anymore. Quadberry hurt himself and William made himself deaf from playing the drums too loud. Both of their paths ended up in different directions then they originally planned

This story has sort of a sad twist to it, especially how not only two friends grow apart, but also how stupid decisions change their future and what they want to do.

"Rules of the Game" POV and Theme

"Rules of the Game" is told from a young Chinese girls perspective, who is the main character. She grew up poor in Chinatown with her mother, father and two brothers. At church where they give away presents to poor children she receives a pack of Life Savers and one of her brothers, a chess set. She becomes obsessed with the games.

She would sit in her room and read about the game. She learned many secrets and began to beat her bothers who eventually lost interest. She brings the chess set to the park where old men would play the game and begins to play a man, Lau Po. He is much better then her brothers and teaches her many moves for the game as well as etiquette. She eventually becomes better than Lau Po and begins to beat many other opponents, attracting a small crown around her on the weekends.

She eventually enters a tournament and wins. Then she wins another. Soon shes a chess sensation at the age of nine, having her picture Life magazine. Her mother begins to treat her differently than her bothers and parades her around like shes a trophy of hers and the girl resents this. She begins to run from her mother and at that point she has to think about what she is going to do next. She had no more moves to make, which was never an issue before. She always had a move for everything.

"Cathedral" POV and Theme

The point of view is a first person from the main character. He has a wife who has a blind friend of whom she used to work for. The blind man is coming to visit them after losing his wife to cancer. The main character is definitely weird out by having a blind man in his home for whatever reason. It almost seems as if hes slightly prejudice, or ignorant, especially when he asks his wife about the blind man's wife, "Was his wife a negro?" The wife and the blind man kept in touch by sending tapes back and forth to each other. I believe that also added to the main characters weirdness about the man as it seems as though he is slightly jealous.

The blind man, Robert, finally arrives and they have all enjoy dinner together. The main character, Bub, points out how Robert doesn't wear dark sunglasses like blind people do and how weird his eyes were, with too much white around the pupil, darting back and forth without Robert knowing. After dinner and a few drinks, Bub's wife dozes off and Robert and Bub are left to talk.

After watching the news, a show about Cathedrals and the Middle Ages is on the TV. Bub asks Robert if he knows what a cathedral looks like and he says no. Robert asks Bub to describe one and he can't quite describe it. Robert suggests Bub get a pen and paper and they could draw one together. They do so, with Robert's hand on Bub's following every pen stroke. Towards the end Robert asks Bub to close his eyes. As they finish the drawing, Bub doesn't not open his eyes back up. At the end of the story, it almost seems as if this "opened up" Bub's eyes to the blind man's life.

"River of Names" POV and Theme

"River of Names"
This story is told by the main character of the story. It is about a woman who clearly had quite the troubled childhood where the the children were a dime a dozen and beaten, raped, and killed. She was born sort of in between generations of children and therefore seeing everything from an outside perspective. She was also a lesbian which meant she would not bear any more children to the family. Basically, she was different from the rest, although she was not treated any differently.

Quotes such as "We were so many we were without a number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted?" and "They did and were not missed" really shows how children weren't really cared for. Essentially every one of the children had their troubled childhoods boil over into their adulthood. "Jack was sent to prison. When he came out, he married and woman and had three children, then one day came home and beat them all to death. Cousin Melvina had three children with one husband. He left and she lost the children to welfare. He three more and lost those too.

The main character never told her girlfriend about exactly how troubled her past was. To her girlfriend, Jesse, she just had a weird fascination for violence. She always tried so hard to not become like everyone in her family and never said a word about it. The name of the story finally makes sense she she says "Ive got a dust of river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, as I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be." Realizing she could not go on with her relationship the way she has been, she cracks and tells her girlfriend the truth.