Hi everybody!
As we decided in class last week, your written test will be taken online, here in this blog. Your task is to comment on four of the short stories studied throughout Unit I of our course, namely:
- A Rose for Emily;
- To Room Nineteen;
- I Sing the Body Electric!;
- First Love, Last Rites or another short story of your choice, studied in Unit I.
To post your comment, click on the title of each short story above, and you will be directed to the corresponding post.
You must produce one or two well-written paragraphs – introduction, development and conclusion – answering the question that is proposed on the text of the post. You may also, of course, interact with your classmates and / or with the previous students who used this blog. Each post is worth 2.5 points, and remember you may comment as many times as you wish.
Your deadline is June 05th.
Good luck to you all!!! 
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FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES
To me, one of the most interesting short stories we discussed in class is First Love, Last Rites, first of all because Joey and Sissel are younger than other couples from other short stories, like Martha/ Martin, Susan/ Mathew, and because they don’t seem to be willing to endure the circumstances of an adult life. I agree with Mel (I think she is a former student) when she sad that Sissel and Joey lived like animals just feeding themselves and having sex, what shows something like animalism in their lives; she sad her analysis was crazy, but I liked it very much. But, in fact, what really draw my attention was the element that made the couple figured out that they needed to grew up as a family: the rat. Although some people considered it a disgusting subject (as I read in some comments from the blog and as I heard in classroom) I considered it a symbol of transformation; the rat brings out in Joey the responsibilities of a husband, such as protection and initiative.
Moreover, the rat is also represents a change needed in their home and in themselves as human beings; The rat’s presence challenged the couple by disturbing them, and Joey decided to put an end in that situation; after killing it, they realized that they were (or that they had to be) adults who needed to live in a clean and organized environment. When Joey assumed the control, consequently Sissel assumed her role as a woman by deciding that they had to clean the house. At first the decision of killing the rat was frightener; Joey didn’t really know if it was a good choice, but when he realized that he had to face the challenge and then when he won it, he and Sissel felt renewed.
Comment about “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”
In this short story we are told the story of a family (The Schwartz) which lives in a not so far future (2158 A.D.). The plot is the following: there are twelve billion people in the world, natural resources are gone, people’s lives are lasting longer, the cities have grown to the point of one neighboring another.
It is totally chaos. And in the Schwartz family there is a problem: many generations live un der the same roof. This has to do with the anti-gerasone, which is a kind of medicine that stops the aging of the body. So we have the patriarch Gramps who owns everything, and his lineage that depends on him.
An amount of thirty people living in the same place, without privacy and comfort is not the ideal kind of life.
The interesting thing about this SS is that it really fits in nowadays context. Medicine has evolved and this is making people live more. There are more treatments to diseases that in the past were mortal. The drugs have been developed by cientists and technology.
It seems that Vonnegut was predicting the future in this science fiction short story.
The thing about the anti-gerasone is that it brings an ethical question: When should someone die? Because in these conditions people can live forever. And this is the conflict that is held between Lou and Em and Gramps.