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Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine

The narrator of “Mr. Pirzada Comes to Dine” is a little girl between probably 2 nd and 3 rd grade. The year is given, and the reader is constantly reminded of the time period by the repeated theme of the Pakistani Civil War in 1971. The narrator, Lilia, describes the year of 1971, focused around the constant visits of Mr. Pirzada, a visiting researcher whose family still lives in Dacca, the city most affected by the war. The most critical part of the story is Lila’s perspective. Lila at the beginning of the story looks at the war from an American perspective. Why, because this little girl is American. Everything around her is telling her to be American. The only thing she learns in Social Studies is the history of the USA, specifically before it became deeply involved in global politics. Lila’s mother is very excited about how American she is, but there are small tid-bits in the story, off-hand comments like “I’ve never seen an Indian witch before,” which show the reader that the whit...
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Aguantando

"Aguantando,” a form of the verb aguantar (to endure), is a short story dealing with a young boy from the Dominican Republic. The narrator, Yunior, “lived without a father for the first nine years of” his life. Aguantando is the story of Yunior and his family enduring, or lasting, through the time the father is gone. The family scrapes by on boiled everything, but mostly plantains. Yunior is too young to remember his father before he left for America. Yunior holds an idealized picture of his runaway father in his mind. The family literally barely endures. Neither of the boys has books, they are each given a pencil every few months, and the mother works twelve-hour days. The mother is by all definitions a saint, yet it is the father who Yunior’s young juvenile mind fixates upon. Yunior’s idealized picture of his father’s arrival is ironically placed in Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories. The reader already has a picture of the father in their minds while reading “Aguantand...
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How to Interpret Moore

“How” by Lorrie Moore, like many of the stories in Self Help , is told in second person. Four stories in Lorrie Moore’s collection have titles which begin the word “How.” This particular story is only the single word “How,” and seems to be a generalization of many hows. How to break up with a boyfriend, how and where to find that boyfriend, how a family wedding will turn out. By using the pronoun “you,” Moore familiarizes the narrator with the reader, and even puts the reader into the narrator’s shoes. We experience the unnamed narrators experience right alongside her.             Lorrie Moore crafts the story “How” like a create your own adventure. “Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale.” Moore leaves the choice wide open to the reader. The boyfriend we choose may “manage a hardware store” and we may have met him “in a bar.” As the story goes on, we are presented with less and less options. The narrator st...
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Johnnie’s Struggle to Find His Niche

Johnnie’s Struggle to Find His Niche             Johnnie struggles throughout “The Outing” to find himself, both in his church and in his family. Johnnie struggles to find his place in his family due to his oppressive preacher father. Johnnie struggles to be accepted by his step-father, because he is a product of his mother’s premarital sins. Johnnie’s step-father does not treat his son with respect, only ever praising and fawning over his half-brother, Roy. The tension between Johnnie and his step-father is palpable, especially when Johnnie attempts to challenge his father, he wants his father to see how much he “hated him” and is met with the response of “We get home, I’ll pull down those long pants and we’ll see who’s the man” (pg. 36).             Johnnie is understandably angry with his step-father. Before the standoff, Johnnie’s father, named Gabriel, had claimed that...
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Teddy’s World Doesn’t Work

Teddy’s World Doesn’t Work             J.D. Salinger introduces us to the somewhat unbelievable main character of Teddy, a ten-year-old who speaks unlike anyone on earth. Teddy uses large words and speaks eloquently, giving the reader a sense that he is wise beyond his years, but to what age is not clear. Teddy, though supposedly sophisticated, seems be naïve to my pre-programmed American brain. Teddy explains his idea of a new education system. He says, "I think I'd first just assemble all the children together and show them how to meditate. I'd try to show them how to find out who they are, not just what their names are and things like that . . .” Me being the American materialist idealist that I am, makes me think that this statement is preposterous. Any education system based solely on discovery would lead to a breakdown and destruction of society. Using a method as described showing students “an elephant, if I had one handy,...
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