Noah's Top Long Thoughts You Need to Know About Short Story

"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...

“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...