Skip to main content

#6 Victory Lap (George Saunders, 2009)

Rating: 8.5/10

    Adults who affect children the most in their early periods are their own parents. Parents are the social acquaintance that helps develop fundamental life skills such as socializing and psychological thought process. In the short story 'Victory Lap,' two kids and one adult, Alison, Kyle, and the Stranger, experience the same incident but reflect it in drastically different aspects. Kyle and the stranger show similar fears by being traumatized by manipulative parents. On the contrary, Alison's parents are the only refuge that protects her safe from all the harm.
    Throughout the entire story, Kyle and the Stranger fail to seek independence from their parents even after almost twenty years of death. Each character's honest inner voice was always disrupted by their parents' comments on their behaviors. For instance, Kyle his the stranger's head with Geode, which symbolizes his parents' oversimplified quantification of his goodness. Even when he tries to do the morally right, Kyle can't halt worrying about defying his parents in such dilemmatic procedures. This way, I cast doubt on the typical Asian 'strict mom' parenting method, which could infinitely trap their kids under repeated traumatic memory.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

#1 A Sound of Thunder - Imperfection may be a part of perfection

A sound of Thunder, By Rad Bradbury(1952) Rating: 8.2/10      After some regretful events, I sometimes imagine how I would've done if I were given another chance. Picturing every situation that my mistakes may be undone, wrongdoings forgotten. Indeed, there exist moments where I would gladly use the time machine to change the past without the slightest hesitation. Fantasizing how everything could have been better and overthinking the imperfect aspect, I fail to consider that the reality I face may be the finest situation out of all possibilities.      Eckels from A Sound of Thunder interacts with his past and completely changes the future. Election results let the anarchists rule the country, and there exists confusing orthography. The confusion Eckels feels before he dies makes me connect with him and think, "Maybe past mistakes I've made were the least worst mistakes. If I am given another chance and undo the past mistakes, maybe harsher obstacles await f...

#22 My Wonderful Description of Flowers (Danielle Dutton)

 Rating: 6/10     Danielle Dutton's short story reminded me of " Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian. In "Cat Person," a male character representing toxic masculinity develops an intimate relationship with an underage college student. When the girl starts rejecting him, he shows signs of obsession and eventually calls the girl a 'whore’. Similarly, in Danielle Dutton's story, a taste of feminism is foreshadowed by introducing a man who visits random houses and attempts to assault women. When the protagonist asserts that she doesn't recognize an unknown man who visited her home, the man gradually becomes impatient and turns out to be hostile. The two stories seemed similar in how women were victimized by male manipulations. (Although the severity of male manipulations differs at each level.)     Apart from Danielle Dutton's method of development   used in the story, this could have been more favorable for me. Although the story had a clear developmen...

#10 The Swimmer (John Cheever, 1964)

 Rating: 8.6/10      A surprisingly significant amount of people still find intoxication as a refugee from the painful reality. In fact, society is adding reasons for people to lose complete consciousness so they can’t perceive feelings of inferiority. In this short story, Neddy perhaps escaped into alcoholism from the painful facts, as Cheevers quoted, “Had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that … and that his friend had been ill?”      In this short story, I found it intriguing to read through the author’s delicate usage of symbolism. As Neddy decides to swim southwest from the pool he was with Lucinda, directions of south and west provide specific tones for this story. Whilst ‘south’ provided connotations of warmth, hospitality, and strength, ‘west’ added images of darker intimations as it is the location of the dead in many mythologies. Eventually, the darkness is confirmed as Neddy reaches his destination, only to find it locked...