The Late Short Stories Show

Since I cannot recall a short story that I particularly enjoyed, I will recount a story that I remember very well, and found intriguing. It was not that enjoyable, for reasons that will be apparent soon. This short story is called The Lottery. Those of you familiar with it will certainly remember it. It's a memorable story. --OMG SPOILERS!-- When I read it, I noticed something was just the slightest bit off, with children gathering stones, and people talking in hushed voices. I never thought anything of it, until it came to the big black dot. That was just felt very sinister.Then, surprise! Stoning! Sneak attack! And I just thought, "Wha--?!" The element of surprise made this story so memorable. In retrospect, this story was masterfully crafted. The air of unease really set the stage for the unfortunate woman's stoning, but I was completely shocked by the ending.

This week, I've learned that words like tone can be applied to these sorts of feelings that you get from stories. The "past assignments on short story" that I had for The Lottery was a search for and cataloging of  foreshadowing. That was basic plot-following stuff, but now we're doing some very epic delving into the deep, mysterious realms of literary analysis. And I mean REAL literary analysis, in which we infer things from the pattern of two syllable words with the letter P in the first three letters in a given paragraph, since the protagonist liked the number two and was named Patrick. We explore the things in the story that the author didn't even know was there; we're almost conspiracy theorists, but with more valid points, evidence, and logical thinking. This is a much higher level of thinking than what I did two years ago.

Fun fact: My diction follows the function y= -x²+6x where x is the number of hours since I last slept, and y is my overall level of diction.

I had fun this evening and now I pay the price.
So tired...
Zzz...