Creative Entry

In the following entry I tried to create some examples of irony based on last Friday’s session:

The current safety certificate behind the pane of plexiglass hanging incliningly above the seats impends to fell off today rather than yesterday due to a single rusty screw.

She walked on the path watching nature’s beauty, for instance, the little reddish squirrel running across the lawn before she went back to her room and killed a little spider rappeling from the ceiling with insect spray.

Response on Chapter 8

Chapter eight deals with the point of view in literature as well as with the authorial distance and its limitations in terms of liability of the narrator. It also includes aspects of irony which I found very interesting and challenging.

In respect to the liability I would like to respond on the short story entitled Story by Lydia Davis since this story shows in how far psychic distance can influence the reader’s thinking of the story.

Story is about a woman who has an affair with a man who obviously dates his ex- girlfriend. The way the author describes the character’s inner state and thoughts makes the readyer feel sympathy for the narrator. At the end of the story the first person narrator scrutinizes her boyfriends explanations of what had happened that particular night why his ex-girlfriend would be at his place. I think it is really realistic how the narrator measures all possibilties that would explain why the ex-girlfriend would be at his place:

“But what is the truth? Could he and she both really have come back in that short interval between my last phone call and my arrival at his place? Or is the truth really that during his call to me she waited outside or in garage or in her car and that he then brought her in again …”

Finally, the narrator becomes aware that her boyfriend that she cannot believe him but pretends to do so since she is so attached to him and does not want to lose him.

Response on James Joyce’s Araby

Honestly I had did some research on the internet what the term epiphany means since I have not heard of it before. I have found that epiphany is “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epiphany).

All in all, this short story is about a boy who lives in a very poor neighbothood in Dublin. He falls in love with his friend’s sister and wants to buy her a present at the Araby market. But he arrives very late so that he recognized that most of the stalls are already closed. He is very disappointed of the baazar and went home.

Reading the story it appears to me that all conflict the narrator struggles with occurs inside his mind. At the the end of the story the nnarrotor transforms from an idealistic boy to an adolescents who does not see things like he did before but in a more realistic and rather disappointed manner: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
Finally, I think that using the technique of epiphany in literature makes stories appear to be very close to real life. I have experienced some kind of epiphany myself. I thought I would be friends with somebody and than after an insignificant incident I suddenly realized that he was not a friend at all.