Dialogue "Don't Leave" Exercise

“Don’t leave”

“I can’t do this anymore”

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit dramatic, Simon?”

“Dramatic? I am sick and tired of being your pushover.”

“But I thought you liked being my friend”

“Yeah, I thought I did too. But I don’t know who you are anymore. Where’s the Julia I can always vent to when I’ve had a rough day? Who’s always encouraged me to be the best version of myself?”

“This is about Charlie, isn’t it?”

“Charlie brings out a new side of you, and I can’t tolerate it.”

“You’re jealous of the two of us, I know it.”

“This is absurd.”

“No, this is the truth. Don’t think I can’t see you staring at us in the cafeteria.”

“I’d keep my eyes to myself if you didn’t ditch me every day for lunch to be with him.”

“I ate lunch with you last Tuesday”

“Yeah, and you talked about Charlie the whole time.”

“I thought you’d be happy for me. But, clearly my efforts as your best friend have gone completely unnoticed.”

“Now that’s being dramatic”

“I’ve tried to include you when I’m hanging out with Charlie, but you always say you’re too tired, or have too much homework.”

“Because I don’t want to be your third wheel, Julia. It kills me to see you two together.”

“It shouldn’t”

“But it does, Julia! You deserve better than him. Someone who knows what you want with your life, and who also has the courage to clean away the scary spiders from the shower for you. Charlie doesn’t really care about you, he just wants you to have some fun on his mattress with him.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Julia, he’s a tool. I’m not going to be witness to him breaking your heart.”

“So you’re just going to leave?”

“Yup.”

“Great.”

Hills Like White Elephants Response

The success of Hills Like White Elephants is rooted in Ernest Hemingway’s tense dialogue between the American and the girl. The American tip-toes around the idea of suggesting the girl get an operation, which is believed to be an abortion. The couple communicates poorly, resulting in neither party listening to the other, and each side of the argument refuting its counterpart. I enjoy how Hemingway is able to capture the undeniably tense dialogue between the featured couple. Hemingway writes:

“I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”

“I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”

“If I do it you won’t ever worry?”

“Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t care about me.”

“Well I care about you.”

“Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.”

It is evident here that the man is simply telling the woman what she wants to here. He figures the more he devotes himself to her, and tells her he cares about her, the more everything in the world will turn out alright. Both talk, however it is clear that neither the man nor the woman is able to understand their partner’s point of view. Additionally, I enjoy how blunt the woman becomes as the dialogue continues. In the quote above, it is easy to sense the pain within the woman’s voice when she results to saying she doesn’t care about herself. This moment is beautiful, for it is the first time the woman is able to break the repetitive rhythm of “I love you’s” set forth by the man. It is here where we being to see that it is her body, therefore she is to choose.  

In Class Exercise - Post

Image: A large freight is heading south on the Alaskan Way tracks. Cargo packages from Hong Kong to Tokyo lie organized from cart to cart. A young man, age 23, hurries quickly down the street that is soon to intersect the tracks. He is late to work and it’s his first day on the job. He sees the Puget Sound ahead of him, past the shore of Sculpture Park. The city is loud and roars with the morning commotion of public transportation and t-shirt venders. Distracted by the gory of the city, the young man continues forward, ignoring the lowering guardrails for the train ahead of him.

Image: When I was in college, I had a journalism assignment to bring to light the danger of certain intersections near campus. Students were neglecting stop signs both on their bikes and in their cars, resulting in many students going to the ER. One day when I was walking here from campus, I noticed an old man sitting on a ledge by Cambridge Elementary. He wore a neon safety vest and kept his white tennis shoes sparkling clean. There was something about this man that led me to believe he was wiser than most.

Brownies By ZZ Packer

I thoroughly enjoyed this short story, due primarily to ZZ Packer’s relentless use of detailed character description in her text. The story holds an interesting conflict between two very different Brownie troops. The conflict is successful for Packer paints the two troops as polar opposites.

She opens her story with, “By the end of our first day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions like a bland of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney Characters.” Soon thereafter, she describes the image of the other Brownie troop’s adult leader. “Mrs. Margolin even looked like a mother duck—she had hair cropped close to a small ball of a head, almost no neck, and huge, miraculous breasts. She wore enormous belts that looked like the kind weight lifters wear, except hers were cheap metallic gold or rabbit fur or covered in gigantic fake sunflowers.”

I love the contrasting characteristics between the two troops. Where troop 909 consists of prim young white girls concerned with Disney Princess, Packer explains the other as being led by a large, immensely-tacky supervisor, naturally providing the foundation for conflict. Packer’s story is intriguing, for it features stereotyping and the not-so-hidden tension still existent between whites and blacks. This is further brought to light in one of the final moments in the story when ‘Snot’ explains a time when, out of religious motivation, white people once painted her porch.

Packer writes, “Daphne asked quietly, ‘Did he thank them?’ I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees. ‘No,’ I said, and suddenly knew there was something mean in the world that I could not stop.” This moment solidifies the tension between the two opposing sides. It’s a rich way to end the story.

  

Surrounded by Sleep Response

Akhil Sharma shows her passion for her characters through her relentless character development. Her short story is delightful to remain engaged with, for the reader is informed on every event that occurs within the world of the story, as well as within each character’s mind.

“Ajay, in his nervousness, spoke the truth. ‘I’m asking God to give me a hundred percent on the math test.’ His mother was silent for a moment. ‘What if God says you can have the math grade but then Aman will have to be sick a little while longer?’ she asked. Ajay kept quiet. He could hear cars on the road outside. He knew that his mother wanted to bewail her misfortune before God so that God would feel guilty. p. 344

This quote informs the reader on the particular character traits of both Ajay and his mother. Due to the misfortune placed on his older brother, Sharma alludes that Ajay becomes worrisome and self-centered, as if serving as a distraction from the severity of Aman’s condition. Additionally, I love how this quote reveals the motive behind the mother’s praying: to make God guilty for all her misfortune. This parallel’s with the guilt she impinges on Ajay when she asks him consider the importance of his brother’s health, rather than a high math grade.

Additionally, Sharma’s use of third person point of view in her character descriptions and character development, allow her to shape certain characters, for she is not restricted by the thoughts in a individual character’s mind. Sharma writes:

“Suddenly Ajay hated himself. To hate himself was to see himself as the opposite of everything her wanted to be: short instead of tall, fate instead of thin. When he brushed his teeth that night he looked at his face: his chin was round and fat as a heel. His nose was so broad that he had once been able to fit a small rock in one nostril.” p. 349

This quote paints the image of how Ajay sees himself, now that his life is consumed by his brother’s illness. I love the detail about Ajay once fitting a rock up his nose. Sharma’s third person point of view enables her to include details that otherwise may not be incorporated if limited to the thoughts of a character.