Adit K's The Short Story Blog

I feel like a story we've read this semester that connects to our current situation is "Speech Sounds" by Olivia Butler. In both cases, society is ravaged by an illness that affects individuals' ability to communicate with each other. One achieves directly and the other indirectly. Coronavirus has prevented us from truly speaking to anyone outside of our immediate families. Society has been halted, sports canceled, economy suffering, streets emptied, all indications of a collapsed community. While it hasn't reached the extremity described in "Speech Sounds" there are definitely parallels.  While we see a lot of similarities between these diseases in terms of their effect, I think the biggest connection is how we distinguish the people who are afflicted and the people who aren't. The speechless are almost considered subhuman, shown by Rye's reaction to Obsidian's incoherence. "He made the same sound over and over the way some speechles

Jenny Zhang's "The Evolution of My Brother" is a short story about the growth of Jenney's younger brother and the effect it has on her as the narrator. Zhang makes a point to show Jenney's lack of growth while demonstrating her brother's to the fullest. For example, in the opening paragraph, the two have a playful exchange that resembles that of siblings at a similar age.  “Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it.” I backed him into a corner with the coffee end of the candle pointed at his mouth. “Stop it, Jen-naay,” he said, stepping back, “or I’ll enable my force shield to turn your bones into dirt” (Zhang 1). However, as readers, we know that the age gap between the two is about 9 years which is clearly not reflected in Jenney's behavior. These are common occurrences for her and there was even a time when her lack of maturity and patience caused her to lash out a hold a knife to her own brother's neck.  Zhang's recurrence back to the theme of

How does Shirley Jackson's The Lottery  embody irony? How is Jackson able to construct her story relying on such a theme? The answer to the latter question presents itself in the first few pages of the story. Jackson creates a seemingly innocent, communal setting that directly contrasts the ensuing horror of the Lottery. The very first sentence, "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full­summer  day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green" (Jackson) is key. Jackson's use of words such as clear, sunny, fresh warmth, blossoming, richly green, all establish the happiness of the day and give no indication of how dark it would become. The people themselves at the beginning of the story perpetrate happiness. Children outside "broke into boisterous play and their talk was still of the classroom, and the teacher, of books and reprimands." Soon after, "the men began to gather, surveying their

"I sat where I was, more depressed than ever, hating the whole hopeless, stupid business, and wondering whether the human species would ever grow up enough to learn to communicate without using fists of one kind or another," (Butler 110). This sentence marks the concluding lines of Octavia Butler's Speech Sounds. Its a part of the afterword, and describes how the short story came into fruition as well as the underlying theme of the text. Communication is the most important thing man has created, shown by two key scenes in the text.  Speech Sounds takes place in a time when an illness, perhaps a bioweapon from Russia, has ravaged America. Those who survived the symptomatic stroke were severely impaired in speech and communicatory function, almost becoming living zombies. The protagonist of this story is Valerie Rye, who remains one of the few people who can still talk embodying the voice who can put an end to the senseless fighting. If people could understand her. The fi