Mrs. Watson
English 113 Section 102
Formal Blog
April 16, 2011
Just a Bit Pessismistic
From "The Necklace" to "The Cask of Amontillado" it seems that all of the stories we have read have
had a tendency show the worst in all things. Growing up I was taught to see the good in everyone and
everything despite the circumstances. Audiences love to see a great ending to a story or a movie and are
even intrigued when the ending is terrible. After reading our short stories I noticed that there were a great
deal of gloomy conclusions. For example, in "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick, Rosa's baby, Magda, is thrown
against an electric fence and dies. In "The Three Strangers" by Thomas Hardy, the Misfit and his gang,
murder an entire family and even the poor pleading grandmother gets it too. Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"
portrays a whole village of people stoning their neighbors because they are following tradition.
All of these stories makes you wonder do we as people really enjoy death and despair? Maybe it is the
fact that the authors were "messed up" psycholigically. None of the short stories we read in class had a
"story book" ending. Hopefully we will read some poems that will give us all an optimistic outlook on life
because after this past section we are going to need it.
Works Cited
Hardy, Thomas. "The Three Strangers." Roberts, Edgar V. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and
Writing, 9th Ed. New York: Longman, 2009. 287-300.
Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." Roberts, Edgar V. Literature: An Inroduction to Reading and Writing,
9th Ed. NewYork: Longman, 2009. 141-145.
Maupassant, Guy de. "The Necklace." Roberts, Edgar V. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and
Writing, 9th Ed. New York: Longman, 2009. 5-12.
Ozick, Cynthia. "The Shawl." Roberts, Edgar V. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing,
9th Ed. New York: Longman, 2009. 266-268.
Poe, Edgar Alan. "The Cask of Amontillado." Roberts Edgar V. Literature: An Introduction to Reading
and Writing, 9th Ed. New York: Longman, 2009. 519-523.
I agree with you one-hundred percent! In this past section, all of the stories seem to have a crazy ending. In every single one of them the ending is completely different from what i expected it to be. All of the authors chose to write about death instead of happy things, hopefully the poetry is a little easier on the imagination.
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