Thoughts on Dubliners

I couldn't quite get into the stories we read in Dubliners. I've always been a fan of stories that have a little more action and I get bogged down when there is paragraphs of description about someone's house. It's nice sometimes to use that description to make the reader really imagine what the place looks like, but I think Dubliners just had too much. By the time I was done reading about what a bookcase looked like I almost forgot what was going on in the plot at the time.

In Araby I was able to get into the story a little more because there was a little more action and plot movement, the story is still very short though so it's hard to get a whole lot out of it.

In A Painful Case the early few pages were very slow due to the amount of description forced upon us, and not until about the bottom of page 91 does the plot start moving forward as Mr. Duffy started meeting the woman.

I am just looking forward to reading Cal and hopefully since it isn't a collection of short stories there will be more plot movement to keep it interesting and not paragraphs upon paragraphs of details that are really more in depth than what is needed for a 10-20 page story.

Lahiri and Lisa's English 110 Class

So after reading the blogs from the English 110 class it sounds like quite a few people have said that they think nothing really happens in Lahiri's stories. While the stories do seem relatively simple, they do have a lot more depth to them than I first expected, and I must say I really liked them. Short stories in general have to leave information out, and I think Lahiri did a great job of deciding what we could infer ourselves and what needed to be spelled out.

To me, some of the best stories are the ones that make me think and have ideas you have to dig for underneath the fairly straight-forward main plot. Katie mentioned in her blog that Lahiri's stories focus greatly on character development and not as much on plot, and I'd have to agree, but I don't agree with her that it means the reader can't be affected emotionally. I can say just going by the discussion we had in class that some people really got into "A Temporary Matter" when the characters have to deal with the knowledge of Shukumar admitting to holding their child at the end. Given how short the stories are I think Lahiri showed a great amount of character depth which allowed for emotional attachment that couldn't have been done by just forwarding the plot.

Hannah also mentioned her thoughts on how Lahiri's stories analyze how Indian culture views American culture, and I'd agree that the stories take that view. The thing that surprised me was looking at the back of the book and finding out Lahiri never even lived in India, and was born in England and moved to the United States. This raised some questions for me. Can we still look at these stories as if they were from an Indian point of view, or is it what an American thinks an Indian point of view would be? Are these stories accurate representations of Indian culture if the author doesn't know any more about it than what she has possibly studied in other books? This could also be why so many of her stories take place in the United States or involve American characters in them.