Relief

This is Lena Gruber.

"Relief," by Peter Ho Davis, has an interesting combination of historical fiction and humor. There are significant stories told that incoorperate pretty gruesome stories that involve the war, thus being a valid recounting of the war, but humor is used to guide these stories but also used to lighten the heaviness of the events being told. The title is wittfully chosen because the story begins and ends with farting which is "relief" but this mention of "relief" also serves as a litterall comic relief.

(Following is what I mistakenly wrote for last week but did not know was for this week)
The title of this short story "Orientation," by Daniel Orozco, is extremely literal. The whole short story consists of a the narrator talking to "you", the reader, which the reader can easily identify as. The narrator is showing this "you" around explaining the layout of the place without too much detail, just enough that that the reader can follow along. The jumping from place to place adds a fast pace to the story, making the situation all the more realistic. The reader can easily get the sense that he/she is being introduced to a new work place, with all this new information coming at once, and the difficulty to take it in all at once. This confusion is created with the help of many "orientation" words like "over here" "over there" and much name dropping. The reader does not know much about them and does not get that much physical description either. It is very realistic because if in this position, one does not have enough time to really analyse physical feature and know or care about each name and their back story. This short story is merely just orientation and does not have a resolution, conflict, or anything of the sort. The reader wonders if it can be considered a short story or not in that case.