Popular Mechanics by Raymond Carver.
This story was really depressing to me. The setting from the beginning of the story made me think that this was not going to be a sunshiny happy story. The descriptive language such as "melting into dirty water" and "it was getting dark inside too" makes the reader realize the true attitude to come in the story. I would like to think that the author was taking the expression "ripping the family apart" to a exaggerated extreme.
"In this manner, the issue was decided" (Carver, 335).
Question one asks what the issue was and I think that it asks how it was decided. The issue that was focused on in this story was that of custody of a child. The child, being an innocent baby, was caught up in a bitter divorce between a husband and wife. The decision of the dispute was left up to the reader to imagine, which I imagined a gruesome and violent scene where the child is torn limb from limb by the parents in their blind rage at each other. There is one thing that I thought the author did rather well. He left a lot of the plot up to reader speculation. For instance, why are these two fighting, how old are they, who is at fault, and most of all, what exactly did the child endure.
Stories structured to give the reader opportunities to create part of the story are great, this one was just a bit too dark for me to enjoy though.
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