Prompt: What do you find most striking about the ways in which two or more of the short stories connect?
The short stories ‘Sticks’ and ‘Girl’ share common craft qualities that contribute to their meaning in a similar manner such as their respective densities and long-spanning point of view, whilst also having their own qualities that distinguish the two stories from each other.
In the story ‘Sticks’, we are presented with a character who describes his dad’s fixation of a pole as a motif to represent life events in a tangible and materialistic manner. We are positioned to perceive the dad as an irregular character who does not operate in accordance with societal expectations. This is a similarity that is reflected in the story ‘Girl’ as we see a prescriptive and dogmatic point of view of the expectation placed upon women to play a subservient role in society. My initial gut instinct when reading both stories was a sense of irregularity, and upon further reflection, I can identify that this is an intended effect for both stories as they both represent an insight into aspects of society that are perhaps not as prevalent. Both stories challenge the reader to grapple with their central ideas, and this is an interesting connection.
Another similarity is the density of both stories, with ‘Sticks’ spanning nearly a lifetime with reference to key events in the father’s life and ‘Girl’ acting as a guide for an ideal housewife and containing numerous sweeping assertions joined together by semicolons to form one dense paragraph of text. The monotonous and tedious nature of the piece ‘Girl’ elicits pity out of the reader, just like the descriptions of the father in ‘Sticks’, and they both share this common quality of a demeaning undertone towards the central characters which possibly represents society’s willingness to put down those who don’t adhere to norms.
With that being said, there is a key difference in the way ‘Sticks’ has a break in the paragraph which shows a shift in the description of the father, whereas Girl does not have this quality. While Girl is portrayed as more regular, this quality shows how they Sticks represents the complex nature of the dad’s life and the change in perception of the people around him whereas Girl represents a set and fixed view that is oblivious to an individual’s situation or environment.
Great analysis! I’d just like to add that what you mentioned about pity and the idea of sympathy, especially for ‘Sticks’, is quite interesting. The speaker seems as if he does not care about the father and that he/she holds something against the father, however, towards the end of the story, where they throw the pole into the garbage, with the way it is written you can’t help but feel a little sorry for the father. Meanwhile, with ‘Girl’, you pity the girl for having to follow all the rules, but it seems less personal, more detached until the end. Both stories invoke some degree of sympathy in the readers, but the way it is done is different in both cases, and I think that it very interesting.
In my opinion, this is a thoroughly insightful analysis that draws interesting and unexpected parallels between two completely different contexts. To what extent do you think that these two short stories, through their similarities despite completely different contexts, represent the universality of the themes you have mentioned?