Krista Smathers on "Orientation"

Daniel Orozco's piece, "Orientation" provides a brief, but telling description of office life through what can be interpreted as a third-person omniscient narrator.  At the beginning the narrator is clearly introducing a new employee to the workplace.  However, as the story continues, lines like, "John LaFountaine is harmless, his forays into the forbidden territory of the women's room simply a benign thrill, a faint blip on the dull flat line of his life," force readers to wonder if they are experiencing only the oral communications of the narrator.  Sentences like these, heavy with description and vocabulary not usually invoked in dialogues, lend to the opinion that readers may be reading unvoiced thoughts of either the narrator or the implied listener.  "Orientation" becomes more about the personal lives of the employees than instructional narration as it chugs along at a rhythmic, routine pace.  Everything about the writing style--repetition, didactic tone, pace--evokes normality.  However, if readers pay attention to what the words state, they conclude that the atmosphere is not as one-dimensional as it seems, as evidenced through the characterization of Anika Bloom and Kevin Howard.