Fiction Short Stories Responses

Survivors

This story was very sad. Just like in poetry, each story has its own vibe and feeling to it. This story felt sad and depressing. Also, just like poetry, you had to read a little deeper and between the lines to understand what is going on. There are two gay men who are dying, and the narrator wants to die first. He doesn't want to have to deal with his partners family, who doesn't seem supportive of their lifestyle and he also doesn't have to have to take care of his partners things after he's gone.

This story was not only sad because it is about death, but it is sad because it is about the unsupportiveness of the gay community. The narrator talks about how his family would disapprove of the Gay Freedom Day in their loft and how his partners father tried to beat his sexual orientation out of him.

I thought of what we talked about in class, how a fiction story has a characters, in a place, where something happens. In this story, the main characters are the two gay men, they live on Doloress Street, which must be somewhere warm and near a bay, and their story is about how they are dying. The story does not mention how they are dying though. My guess is that they are dying of AIDS because they have few T cells left, which are cells that help fight disease and AIDS suppresses your immune system.

Morning News

This short story was also a little depressing, and about illness. The story describes everything that this man is thinking and feeling after he is told he has a short time to live. Right after he learns he is dying, he says, "What do people do next?" This is an important line because it shows how he is scared about the future and how he doesn't quite know how to handle the situation.

I like the ending of this short story because he talks about how most people would go do something crazy if they only had a short time to live, but he just wanted to spend it with the person he loves most, his wife. Not doing anything crazy, but just loving each other. You can tell how much he loves her because he says it would be much harder if she were as sick as he was because he doesn't want her to have to go through that pain.