2. Why the heroine of the “Girlness” is a tomboy?
In the “Girlness”, the author divided girls into two kinds. One is girlish, other are tomboys. The heroine of “Girlness” is a tomboy. She doesn’t have the girlness that girls suppose to have. She has no long hair, no Barbie doll or beautiful dress. But does she really want to be a tomboy? I don’t think so. Actually she wants to be a girlish girl in her deep heart. She once asked her mother, “Can I grow my hair long, ma” (186)? But her mother answered, “Your hair would look like hell” (186). And when she saw other girl had a doll and wore beautiful clothes, she would feel envious. Once she asked her mother for a Barbie doll, but also rejected by her mother. Different requirements, same result. And she never has resistant words from her mouth. She just thought in her mind, “Would she have been a more momish mom if the war had never happened? Would I have been a more girlish girl” (188)? Then she had a 13 year old girl came to stay with her. She brought the girl so many stuffs. It reflects that the heroine has the quality as a girlish girl; she is good at shopping, although she didn’t buy those stuffs to herself. She loved the girl’s sense of girlness. She liked the super monkey head and her pals, but she thought it was too frivolous, too girlish, and too late. She had a desire about those, but she was not brave enough, since she was a tomboy so many years and her mother just gave her the thought that she should be like that, like a tomboy, no one else. But the 13 year old girl encouraged her, “Oh, super monkey head doesn’t have an age limit. It’s for everybody” (192)! After Norabelle’s words, the heroine gets the idea that it’s never too late for super monkey head and her pals. She finally found herself.
Huili Tang

2. What is the effect of the narration style—an adult looking back on her childhood?

3. How does Barry address issues of race and class? What is the effect of seeing these issues from a child’s perspective?

4. Address Barry’s own questions from the introduction: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?”

ENGL 311

1. Why does Linda Barry choose suc h a form to write her autobiography?

2. What does she want to express through the stories?

3.What does the name  “One Hundred Demons” have to do with the stories?

4. Are there any relationships among these stories?

Barry identifies different demons throughout the book, which can you identify with the most?

What aspects of post modernism does Barry display in her writing?

How is the story autobifictionalography? Does this word really describe it?

1) Many of the stories in this second half of the collection, though not all, have men as narrators, or no individual narrator at all. Why?

2) In “Dearth,” Bender draws a direct connection between the narrator and the past through the rain. How does she use the past in her other stories? Who does the past effect most?

3) How does “Ironhead” play with the ideas of difference and longing and family?

4) What do the last two sentences in Willful Creatures, including the “Amen,” comment on about the short story itself?

2. It seems that Bender’s stories are full of women’s stories. Those women are self-empowering and self-destructive. Is it really so?

3. Why did Bender use a lot of  curse words in her Willful Creatures? Is it proper?

1) Throughout the first 113 pages, each of Bender’s stories explores some sort of transformation in one or more of the characters. However, it is not always the main character who transforms. What is the overall significance of the transformations in all, and also on an individual level?

2) Many of Bender’s stories play on different, sometimes conflicting, emotions. How does this idea reflect on the overall theme of the stories?

3) Taylor cites that the story “The Meeting” has “an undisguised and unironic moral.” Can this be applied to some of Bender’s other tales?

4) Leslie says “Bender…fails to offer the reader a unique version of the world.” Is this true? If it is, then does it really matter in the context of Bender’s stories? That is, do her stories have to be a truly unique version of the world, or can they be the world we know and live in, but with ironic and mystical twists?

How does “Cat’n’Mouse” relate to the world?

     “Cat’n’Mouse” has clear roots in the cartoon Tom & Jerry. Persistent cat, clever mouse; the dichotomy is familiar to a contemporary audience. The episodic nature of the story is interesting. The way Millhauser is writing is like episodes of the cartoon are being played out. You know when books are made into movies? Well, Millhauser worked the other way.
I can remember how hard I laughed at Tom & Jerry. The scenes Millhauser writes are very similar. But when reading about it the humor is lost, and the violence is highlighted. Given the human qualities of both characters, the violent situations are appalling. I didn’t even notice how awful they were until the guillotine scene. That one scene broke the atmosphere of the story. I was shocked back to reality.
     Considering Millhauser’s ideals about the grandeur of the short story, there has to be a reason for the shock back. At first I thought back to this odd moment when the mouse is considering his existence with the cat. He knows “of the temptation of indifference; he must continually exert himself to be wary. He feels that he is exhausting his nerves and harming his spirit by attending to the cat” (891). Certain key words (temptation, exert, spirit) sent me spinning into a commentary on religion, specifically, Christianity. The cat as Satan reading came to mind, especially when the mouse considers the cat’s “boundless energy” and constant pursuit of the mouse.
     A Christianity reading does not work for every episode. A commentary on violence might work. The physical conflicts get increasingly more violent, peaking with the guillotine. The human qualities of the characters might help the reader understand the violent nature of humans. But again, I’m not sure this works for every episode. But the episodes do get more and more violent. One way Millhauser shows this is with his use of color. For most the bulk of the story everything fits into a few colors (red, blue, yellow, green, cream/white). The episode before the guillotine black is introduced. In a world painted with basic colors black stands out like a huge stamp of darkness.

In his interview, Dave Eggers mentions how his “story masquerades as a fable” (187). Do you think his story is masquerading as a fable?
The Fable Checklist:
Animal character: check
Animals exhibiting human qualities: check
Underlying theme or moral: check
Wise old man named Aesop: no check
     So, “After I was Thrown in the River and Before I was Drowned” is missing Aesop, but I don’t think Aesop as ever thought about writing like Dave Eggers. Steven engages the reader on a personal level. The blanket ,this-could-be-anyone, feeling that fables typically have is not present in Eggers’ story. I feel that Steven could connect and translate to many types of readers, but the way the connection occurs differs from the fable. Eggers’ story is a story masquerading as a fable, but actually creates a better fable because of the effective connection.

“Cat ‘n’ Mouse,” the story of Tom and Jerry instead told through words, instantly reminds us of that classic cartoon pair, and how silly we always thought Tom was at trying in vain to catch Jerry, failing at every turn. However, when one reads the actions instead of seeing them, the effect is different. On the one hand, seeing a piece of dynamite explode and turn an anthropomorphic cats face black while a cigar destroys his teeth is funny because it’s so ridiculous. But, when one reads the words as Millhauser presents them, the sheer gruesomeness of them is thrown in the reader’s face. Add to this, the terseness with which Millhauser presents the painful sightgags makes them all the more grotesque. For example, “The mechanical cat blows up. When the smoke clears, the cat’s skin hangs in tatters about him, revealing his raw pink flesh and a pair of polka-dot boxer shorts.” (893). This image is comical if taken as a whole, but broken down, it is very different. Millhauser does not use the word “fur” here, as we might recall from the Tom and Jerry cartoons. In those, Tom’s outer layer of fur acts as a set of clothes that shreds as the explosion occurs. Here, however, Millhauser makes us see that the cat’s skin has literally been peeled away, revealing the muscle beneath, the “raw pink flesh.” Almost a torturer’s delight of an image. And this continues throughout the story, reaching deeper into the psyche than simply physical gore. Millhauser also treads the path of out deepest fears in the ironic realms of comedy. He examines our fears of death. Page 893 and Millhauser presents us with another one of the cast hare-brained schemes to catch and annihilate the mouse. When it fails, as it always does, Millhauser ends the paragraph with no definative conclusion, only an implied one. “The cake is ticking loudly: tock tock, tock tock. Puzzled the cat holds it up to one ear. He listens closely. A terrible knowledge dawns in his eyes.” (893) Of course, if we were to watch this in a cartoon, there would be a flash of red and orange for several seconds, and the next scene would start. But Millhauser plays with the use of language rather than sight to look deeper than a simple explosion to scene transition. The tiny stick of dynamite, the harbinger of death, whispered into the cats ear of its imminent detonation, and the cat fears for his life. Such a thing is very human, and very real. Everyone fears death, to a certain degree. There’s an unknown associated with death, both what becomes of us but what also becomes of our loves ones. While the cat here has no apparent loved ones, he doesn’t really know what awaits when that dynamite goes off. Will he really die? Will the next scene come as it always has? Or maybe something altogether different will occur, which neither the cat or the mouse have control over.

Of course, we know the story continues, and in fact ends in a metaphor for all existence. There is the final and most powerful expression of the power of words where imagery fails. And it is there that Millhauser’s sand grains come into play. For each of the little scenes is a single grain of sand, itself a story with a beginning middle and end, with its own meaning tucked away. Millhauser gets it right when he says “[The short story] believes in hidden powers.” (Ambition, page 2). When the mouse erases the cat and then the mouse himself, we see “the grain of sand reveals its true nature.” (Ambition page 2) The mouse pondered, along with the cat, about the meaning of his life. “Is it possible that [the cat] needs the mouse, in some disturbing way?” (897) “[The mouse] is alone with his red handkerchief in a blank white world. After a pause, he begins to wipe himself out, moving rapidly from head to toe. Now there is nothing left bu the red handkerchief.” (897) The cat and mouse were the only ones to begin with in the first place, and when all the environment was torn away, and they were left with each other and one of them disappears, the other loses the only meaning his life ever had. This is the bigger picture. All life requires meaning, no matter who it is. And much of life has meaning. But strip away all that was ever important and your are left with the thought of being alone forever, with no reason to live or even to exist. So the mouse commits suicide since his very existence now has no merit. A dark end to a comically dark story, and appropriate for an author who wants to say much more with the short story than a novel ever could.

How does the semi-stream of doggy consciousness narrative in “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned” contrast with the very real, and cynical, tone that Steven regards humans with?

Eggers makes a very conscious grammatical and tonal choice when he goes inside the head of a dog for the story.  “In the first line alone, [he uses] the word fast four times, establishing the, well, dogness. And also the story’s tone” (Eggers, 186) In doing so, he sets us up for what seems to be a lighthearted story about a dog who, by his own admission, is “a fast dog. I’m fast fast. (Eggers 177) And the story remains lighthearted for a while, but Eggers tone shift dramatically from that of a free spirited, sentient pooch to that of a cold observer, discontent with the ways of the world. “I see in the windows. I see what happens. I see the calm held-together moments and also the treachery and I run and run.” (Eggers 178 ) The dog, Steven, unusually wise in the ways of humans, sees more than they themselves are willing to see. While the stream of consciousness syntax continues as Steven comments on the humans he sees as he runs, the tone that this part of the story takes is a sharp turn from where it was. There was a lot of love and eat and happy and run run run, and now Steven wants to talk about the “stupid conversations coming from their slits for mouths and terrible eyes.” (Eggers 178 ). Steven knows that the humans he sees lie to themselves and look evilly at others, judging them, putting themselves above, telling halve/nontruths, and not batting an eyelash. And then, once again, Steven returns to his love love love, followed still by another sharp turn into how he came to live in his current home. He went through the pound, a place where al there were were other dogs and humans who would let him yell and yell, only letting him out once in a while, and finally releasing him only when some human deigned to take him home. Strangely, though, that same cynical, almost angry tone does not come across after Susan has her leg amputated. Instead, there is only pity. “I race Franklin. Franklin is still angry about Susan’s leg; neither of us can believe that things like that happen, that she has lost a lg and now when she smiles she looks like she’s asking to die.” (Eggers 183) The range of emotion that might come out of those two sentences, from rage to sadness and loss, pity and sympathy. These show that, even through a dog’s eyes, and even through a voice that doesn’t let up in pace, the horrors of life might be too much to bear; that when you lose a part of you, both physically and spiritually, there is once again little meaning in your life, and all you want is to die.

Steven, after his death, does not wish to return to his human family, even though he liked the kids. Though it’s not explicitly stated, Steven is glad he is away from the short and cold world of humans, but also that he is away from all those things that can hurt them, a good deal of which come from humans. Humans, in Steven’s eyes, perhaps, add only misery, and their concept of “home” is an obsolete and unneeded one. If you have the freedom to always run, always have freedom, then, and only then, do you truly live.