ENG 263: The Love Story

The phrase “love is in the air,” takes a very literal connotation in Ha Jin’s creation of the relationship between Kang and Lili. But we never get any sort of perspective from Lili so it seems to be an entirely one sided relationship. The tone of the story almost seemed comical, but in an unintentional […]

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“Love in the Air” by Ha Jin captured the soldiers very well, in a very heartbreaking way. The soldiers were all depicted as young men, so young that they don’t even know if women have hair on their bodies, who are so lonely they will fall in love with a voice, or lose their position […]

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In Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the fact that the four main character are drinking is effective; it sets a tone of honesty and lack of pretense, while also giving insight to their closeness as friends. The dialogue reminds us of their condition, particularly Mel’s, on the bottom of […]

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In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” Raymond Carver does something very interesting when he makes the decision to write in first person yet never really let the narrator speak.  The story is seen through the eyes of Nick, yet we never really hear from Nick or ever get as much information […]

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Over the course of the semester I’ve learned that the first line of any story is normally incredibly important, this story is no different. “My friend Mel McGinnis was talking.” Already we know that the story is going to be told from the first person perspective (the narrator being Nick), and that Mel, presumably, talks […]

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Raymond Carver’s ” What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” uses the interesting narrative choice of have a large portion of the story being the characters telling each other and discussing stories of their lives. This gives the impression that the characters are actual people who have lives and experiences. It also allows […]

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The author immediately directs our attention not to the narrator, but to the character Mel right at the beginning. Indeed, a majority of the story, while told in the first person, is more from the other characters rather than Nick the narrator. The story is structured in the way where there are more dialogue than […]

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Something that struck me about this story was how well-done the dialogue was, which is very essential since this story was mostly dialogue. From the very beginning of the story it’s clear that this is going to be mostly dialogue, the narrator says that his friend Mel is talking in the very first sentence. When the […]

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What I really appreciated about this piece is it’s a love story that is also about the caring/loving yet emotionally injured nature of the protagonist. There is, in the story, platonic love, maternal love, and romantic love. What I found effective about this piece is how the interior thought that states the current situation and explains […]

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Even in the first few lines of Campbell’s “Falling,” I was already strikingly aware of how different this story was from anything else we have read. The story is written in first person, but the gender of the speaker wasn’t obvious until she says “a woman like me,” (pg. 108). In fact, I was under […]

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