Walker Extra Credit

This Paragraph would be added to the end of the Walker's "Roselily"

He looks at her coffee skin smooth and unblemished.  Looking  at the three children who will soon be his he knows he will make her a virgin again.  She will be his beautiful first wife and be reclaimed for his god.  The people in this hot place are irrelevant pieces of her soon to be  dead self.  He will take her new being and carry her north away from these wrong godded people.

SSRJ # 4 Minot- Lust

Wow this piece initially left me feeling despondent with my quiet reminiscence of forgotten parts of my teenage years.  This story brought back many memories from my " lost years" in my early adolescence.  While I was nothing as bad as the narrator in the story.  I could relate to her search for something, maybe anything to feel something, using boys to reach that end.  But, in the end it making you feel much more empty than you were in the beginning. 

I think the most important literary element that stood out to me was the tone.  I think the tone really set the story up to show how casual and laid back the main character was in her pursuit of sex.  Yet, sex is such a serious and important part of being a human being.  She continued to have multiple partners as if she were changing the song on the radio.  Each partner had their own tune but only lasting for a span of about three minutes each.  As she said, " songs went with whichever boy it was". ( Meyer, 350)  By setting the tone so casually it really helped me to grasp the laissez faire attitude of the narrator's emotional state.  It was really no big deal at all.  In fact she felt that this was what was expected of a girl, in a way her feminine duty to the men of the world. " It was different for a girl, if you don't look, they screech off and call you a bitch". ( Meyer, 351)  The one line that really stuck with me and felt this sums up all teenage kids, " Teenage years.  You know just what you're doing and don't see the things that start to get in the way". ( Meyer, 351)  This is the epitome of being a teenager as you of course know best but are not able to acknowledge the problems that come along. 

  I wonder exactly what point was Minot trying to make in this story?  I wonder if it was about herself?  The line, " you don't try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it's nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death... After the briskness of loving, loving stops...", is so devastating to me.  Does this line just make your heart go out the  narrator?  (Meyer, 355)  I just found it so devastatingly sad.  I wonder if she was trying to make a point of the state of affairs our teenagers are in?

SSRJ # 3 D. Walker

D. Walker's " I am the Grass" initially made me quite depressed to be frank.  I thought of all the suffering that those men went through and all the suffering they put others through.  I am left with what Walker says in the first paragraph, " I cannot tell my thirteen year old that once, drunk on Ba Muoi beer, I took a girl her age into a thatched-roof hooch in Tay Ninh City and did her on a bamboo mat". ( Meyer,325)  I immediately felt such disgust for that man.  I did not care what he went through I just felt so emotionally distraught by this admission of horrible guilt that he has.  I started to think to myself, " can't we read anything uplifting?". 

However, I do think Walker was trying to make a point.  I think the setting of Vietnam symbolized the war he feels in himself even at peace times.  I think he was trying to make a point that he pays for his sins on a daily basis.  He can never forget what he has done even while doing a breast implant for a wealthy woman.  As Walker says himself, " I cannot talk about the things that I wish I could forget but know that I never will". ( Meyer, 325)  Walker felt a hate for Vietnam even years later.  He would go a trip to Vietnam to do his own charity work as a way to come to terms with some of the things he did.  Vietnam itself became a symbol of everything wrong in his life and the world.  As he visited there he was able to slowly let down his wall and begin to even like the people there.  He felt somewhat redeemed in fixing the cleft palates of the children there.  He was even given the opportunity to try give Dihn's  a thumb transplant.  He of course was reluctant but found himself being somewhat hopeful towards success of the transplant.  The transplant didn't take and Walker thought that of course it didn't work because that transplant is symbolic of the fact that nothing works in Vietnam.  In the end I think that Walker was able to come to terms with what he had done in Vietnam and to even appreciate the place and the people in a way.  As he says in the end of the story, " In Vietnam danger has always been ubiquitous, life tenuous, for some reason I welcome the risky ride, it makes me feel part of the land". ( Meyer, 338)  I think being a part of Vietnam made him feel alive more so than his life of frivolous plastic surgeries for rich women. 

I was wondering what others felt at the end when Dihn's transplant was not successful?  What do you think Walker's point was exactly?