Fiction Packet Three

Fiction packet three has been by far the easiest packet to read in this class.  I'm not really sure why this one was so much easier to read.  I really enjoyed The Falling Girl by, Dino Buzzati, that was probably my favorite story from fiction packet three.  A majority of the class seemed to enjoy The Singing Fish but I didn't really care for it.  I just wasn't interesting to me.  I liked The Falling Girl  because it was different.  I am still trying grasp the concept of a girl jumping of the top of a building and just floating down.  It's not a story you hear every day. I felt he was very detailed with this piece.  "Within it were powerful men, and women who were even more powerful, furs and violins, cars glossy as onyx, the neon signs of nighclubs, the entrance halls of darkened mansions, fountains, diamonds, old silent gardens, parties, desires, affairs..."  Just after this sentence I feel like I am there with the Marta, the girl who jumped off the building, floating down looking over this luminous city.  I am still confused as to what the story behind the story is, I don't know what the moral of the story is in the end result.  I think my favorite part of the entire story is the end.  The woman sees the girl floating down outside the window and tells her husband about it.  The husband isn't surprised at all, he appears to see this sort of thing on a daily basis.  He states, "It's always like that.  At least these low floors only falling old women pass by.   You can see beautiful girls from the hundred-and-fifth floor up.  Those apartments don't cost so much for nothing."  The wife replies, " At least down here there's the advantage, that you can hear the thud when they touch the ground."  The husband then says, "This time not even that,"  I guess my only question is where did the girl go?  Did she just disappear into thin air?  Does she live forever?  Does she reach her destination that she has been searching and falling towards?  I guess we will never know.  The story leaves sort of a mystery I suppose.  

I don't know if it was just me, but I also noticed in the stories that they all dealt with loss.  All but The Singing Fish.  The girl who is falling is gone, and then there is Death of the Right Fielder...  right of the bat on the first page it states, "There were several theories as to what killed him."  I don't know how the story ends because for some reason in the packet I printed out I only got the first page to that story, so maybe we weren't even supposed to read it.  I have no idea.  And in August 25, 1983 I was a little bit confused when trying to follow it.  I should probably read it again, but from reading it once I gathered that The man is a writer who is lost in time.  He is writing about himself throughout the whole story but he doesn't realize it until he sees himself die.  He is supposed to be dreaming, but I think he is really just lost in reality, but on many different levels.  It reminds me a lot of The Time Traveler's Wife  by Nicholas Sparks.  I haven't actually read the book, but I did see the movie, and I felt the ideas of the stories were pretty similar only the characters were different.  Again going along with the theme of loss and death, even in The Fifth Story the talk of killing cockroaches takes over.  How to kill the cockroaches and just the girl telling multiply stories, that all start out the same, "I was complaining about the cockroaches..."  Leading up to the killing of the cockroaches moving into a new direction.  Each story just adds a little bit more to the end until the fifth and final story.  I think The Fifth Story is right up there with The Singing Fish.  I didn't really care for either of the stories. In conclusion, packet three has definitely been my favorite packet to read.  It is much easier to join in on class discussions when you have actually read the stories all the way through. 

Jfisch10