Sonntag, 9. Dezember 2007

Response on “Other Math” by David Foster Wallace

This short story was very odd and unsettling. It is a story about a Joseph who has fallen in love with his grandfather and tells him so. Reading the short story’s title I did not expect is to deal with that kind of topic.

Letting declare the grandson’s love for his grandfather seems to be normal at first. Of course, do grandsons love their grandfather! But Reading further, the story becomes very odd since Joseph tries to explain to his grandfather that he really loves him

Generally, the author is playing games with the audience since he destroys anything we would expect to be normal. He adds weird details that do not really fit into an every-day conversation with a little boy, for instance, he is telling about somebody who has fallen in love with a “cadaver” and finally put him away. Also, the grandmother does not act like a we would expect from a grandmother by telling Joseph “Your Gram pa's h and w as a dead thing, attach ed to h is wrist by the same force that flung everything toward him, dead and brown, a flat, square conveyor of chill, an extension I never recognized and certainly never held.”

Finally, the oddest thing of the story is the way the speaker indirectly describes how the boy looks at the grandpa in a rather sexually manner. So he lets the grandpa refer to how the Joseph looks at him which makes the story very unsettling: “Don't say anything, Grampa. Just sit. Just like that. That's perfect.” or “Do an old man a favor and don't stare like that, son. All in all, it’s interesting how the author plays with our expectations of how society should look like.

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