Blog Response: Other Reading Source

This week we were supposed to be doing a blog response on something we were reading that was not in the creative writing class. I haven't had much free time to do reading outside of school because i work nine to ten hour shift every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So the stories that I have options to talk about are those i am reading in my Lit class. I had originally wanted to write about As I Lay Dying, by Faulkner. But i also have an interpretive paper project due in that class and i have chosen the story Boys, by Rick Moody. Because i am not yet finished with Faulkner i have decided to do my journal response on the short story Boys.

This story is as simple as it is meaningful. The first thing that grabbed my attention in the story is it's style. The entire story is three and a half pages long and is one long paragraph. The story is also consisted of long run on sentences. These sentences are statements of what a pair of twin boys do when they enter and leave their parents home, the home they grew up in. I believe the style of writing in the story gives way to how quickly life passes when you think back on your own. This is what you did, and this is how fast it went. The run on statement sentences really give you that kind of feeling.

I also really liked that the title and the mention of what the characters do is always in reference to boys. "Boys enter the house." "One boy enters the house bleeding profusely and is taken out to get stitches, the other watches." Every sentences in the story describes these twin boys lives when they enter this house. Throughout the story is is not direct reference to them being men. This is because they become men at the very end of the story. The boys father dies and has to be carried out of the house. The account of the moment of when these two boys became men and stated in the last lines: "here's where the boys are standing, as that beloved man is carried out. Boys, no longer boys, exit." It tell that these boys are no longer boys because they are now men. I loved this story and thought that it was done in a really neat way.