Hills Like White Elephants

   The point of view in “Hills Like White Elephants” caused the story to become very confusing to me. It felt as if I were just listening into a part of someone else’s conversation. It provided no backstory or emotion from the character. The only time that I could tell any type of emotion was when the girl became angry with the man and told him to stop talking. This all caused me to not be able to relate to the characters and their emotions. Relating to characters is important to me because that causes me to become more attached to them and actually care about what happens to them. In this case, I felt no type of attachment to them when I first read this. Instead, all I felt was confusion.

    I was unsure about what the characters were discussing, when I first read the story. This was caused by the point of view. Now that I look back and know what they were discussing, I understand some of the clues the author put into their conversation. I had never read anything, other than plays, written with no type of insight to characters emotions, so when I first read this story I was confused. To be able to better understand stories with this type of point of view, I will have to read similar stories to make myself more familiar.

The Destructors

                When I read The Destructors, I had no idea how I felt about it. I knew I felt bad for Mr. Thomas because I didn’t really see him do anything wrong to the gang of boys, but I didn’t know how I felt about the other characters. At first I couldn’t believe that these children would do something like this; one of them was nine years old. Then in class, I was able to realize that they didn’t really know anything other than violence because of events like the London Blitz. This fact made me start to feel bad for them. I was raised to treat people the way I wanted them to treat me, but obviously these boys weren’t. They wanted to destroy this old man’s house for basically no reason at all. When we were in our groups we kind of discussed this matter a little more. We came to the conclusion that the boys weren’t evil. For example they tried to make Mr. Thomas comfortable when they locked him into the bathroom. They just weren’t completely innocent since they had been exposed to that much violence. An example of this was that they actually locked him into the bathroom just to finish destroying his house.

                One thing that I didn’t like at all was the end. I felt like I didn’t get a complete resolution like I would have preferred. I felt like the ending with the cab driver laughing was completely unpredictable, and when I read it I was confused. Overall, the story wasn’t bad and it did make me think about how I could possibly have been if I were in the boy’s situation.