Blog Post for 9/14/15 Class

Hi, Alistaire here.

The use of adjectives and the arrangement of the story struck me in “River of Names.” Dorothy Allen’s descriptions, while difficult to digest, allowed me to envision the goings-on of the various family members. In my opinion, one of the most gripping lines in the story sits in the first paragraph - the line “my cousin, Tommy, eight years old as I was, swung in the sunlight with his face as black as his shows - the rope around his neck pulled into the sunlit heights of the barn, fascinating, horrible” (3). The color variations between the sunlight from the outside and the darkness of the boy’s face made me feel the difference of the look between “free” life and “confined” death. The flashback arrangement increased the influence of the descriptions. The hesitations of the main character are felt when she hides her family’s realities from her partner Jesse, even though Jesse is very forthcoming with her. The story’s organization and the descriptions reveal that the main character is more or less afraid of herself - a quality in a character that is unique and very true to life, given the context of the story. Accordingly, the tone of the story was bleak. Allen essentially describes a main character that is as afraid of her future as she is of her past.

The nostalgic tone of the Sherman Alexie story and the use of humor stood out to me in “War Dances.” As the main character is diagnosed with a brain tumor, he remembers his father’s health decline. Flashbacks were also used in this story to tie together the main character’s current health issues and his father’s health issues before his passing. While the main character seemed nostalgic about his time with his father in his youth, he also seemed to harbor some type of cultural identity crisis. It was difficult for me to determine if the main character was proud of his Native American heritage or if he believed the stereotypes about the heritage and would rather not be associated with it.

The use of conversation tied the flashbacks to the main character’s current dilemmas and heightened the longing tone of the story. The vocabulary used by Alexie made it seem to me as though the main character felt as if his father was self-destructive and could have tried harder to be a more composed man. The last paragraph of the story is an example of this as is the text under the subtitle “Blankets.”