<\/p>\n
Foer\u2019s narrative is probably the only one of the short stories that seemed relatively clear from the beginning.\u00a0 <\/span>It draws attention to the importance of listening to what is unspoken and untold and cleverly frames the story through the narrator\u2019s instructions on the uses of the \u201csilence marks\u201d:: with each explanation, we are given a piece of information about him that ultimately narrates his story.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ve come across some writings in psychoanalytic criticism, such as Cathy Caruth\u2019s \u201cUnclaimed Experience,\u201d that emphasizes the significance of reading into the silences that is particularly to be exercised with narratives that deal with trauma.\u00a0 <\/span>I wouldn\u2019t know how to approach this story in terms of psychoanalysis, at least not for now, but I get the sense that we are left with an opportunity of exploring the narrator\u2019s silences more deeply and examining not only what he doesn\u2019t say in his conversations but what he doesn\u2019t tell his audience.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n Don DeLillo\u2019s \u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe Uniform\u201d reminds me a lot of Joseph Heller\u2019s novels in terms of its use of elements of absurdity and irony.\u00a0 <\/span>It appears to me that this story follows the style of black comedy and I see the \u201ccartoonishness\u201d that Dr. Sample points to in the portrayals of the killing and raping that paradoxically makes the scenes all the more disturbing. \u00a0<\/span>This narrative style serves the purpose of depicting a grotesque image without the descriptiveness expected and with simplicity and flatness that makes it more comical in a way.\u00a0 <\/span>But to understand the purpose of this use, I\u2019m reminded of something Heller had said about Catch-22<\/em>, that he had wanted his readers to laugh and then look back in horror at what the they were laughing at.\u00a0 <\/span>There\u2019s also the recurrent attempt to articulate a traumatic experience (Harlow and her history of sexual abuse) and not being taken seriously and not being capable of comprehending it that we also see in Catch-22<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/span>Is the excessive use of absurdity and hilarity a retreat from the futile attempts of expressing the horrific and the grotesque?\u00a0 <\/span>Does that suggest the inadequacy of language in these cases?<\/p>\n Link\u2019s \u201cSome Zombie Contingency Plan\u201d I liked the most, despite its difficulty and ambiguity. \u00a0<\/span>By taking the setting and the several references to horror films into consideration, the story seems like a mimicry of horror films of the 80\u2019s and early 90\u2019s that typically start with a group of unsuspecting teenagers gathering at a party where there\u2019s music and beer, midway through the villain crashes and the slaughter begins.\u00a0 <\/span>But in this story the zombies never show up.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019d hate to take this story back to psychoanalysis, too, but does that mean that the whole idea of zombies is just in the protagonist\u2019s head? And why does he continuously slip into different identities as the narrator uses different names for him?<\/p>\n As to Hassan\u2019s \u201cPOSTmodernISM\u201d I was initially put off by its difficulty as I had trouble understanding what he was talking about, but reading more into it, I kind of get him.\u00a0 <\/span>I think his article is interesting and useful.\u00a0 <\/span>I especially appreciate the attempt he makes to compare Modernism and Postmodernism and show how they are different. It\u2019s quite an interesting and ambitious attempt, and I mean ambitious in a good way, considering the time his article was published.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Foer\u2019s narrative is probably the only one of the short stories that seemed relatively clear from the beginning.\u00a0 It draws attention to the importance of listening to what is unspoken and untold and cleverly frames the story through the narrator\u2019s instructions on the uses of the \u201csilence marks\u201d:: with each explanation, we are given a … Continue reading Response to first week’s reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,10,38,14,49],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-2-short-stories","tag-delillo","tag-film","tag-horror","tag-music","tag-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}