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A Temporary Matter Summary

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Two Sad Stories Make for a Happier Reader "Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions…" (18). It was at this point in Jhumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" that I knew I could relate to Shukumar, the husband of Shoba, the two a young couple living in Boston. I could have written the exact same words to describe the night my best friend, turned into boyfriend, broke up with me. Throughout the duration of Lahiri's story, Shoba and Shukumar's lights go out every night due to power maintenance in their neighborhood. Consequently, they eat together in the dark each night, and use the outage as an excuse to finally confront the fact that they have fallen out of love since Shoba's miscarriage, just six months before. The 'confessions game' that Shoba and Shukumar play in the darkness of their home during the power outages is similar to when my high school boyfriend asked me to confess my favorite memory of us in the darkness of his car, just before breaking up later that night. When I came to realize the parallels between "A Temporary Matter" …show more content…

All throughout reading Lahiri's story, it could relate my own experiences. As I read "A Temporary Matter", the feeling of deep understanding for Shukumar's feelings was indescribably comforting. It's human to feel alone, just as it is also human to feel comforted by shared experiences. What this short story by Jhumpa Lahiri did for me was allow me to understand the magical way in which stories are really just bits and pieces of everyone's lives compiled into a realistic but fictional experience, helping humans further understand how alike we all really are. The characters that authors create are not simply make believe and can be real enough to comfort our very real

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for him has “naturally become a struggle”. He joins in this time of sadness in order to supply the reader and admit that “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” appealing to the reader's

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In my life, the books I have read fit into two distinct categories: fiction and nonfiction. However, this marking period, I read Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis, which is a member of a book category that was foreign to me, short stories. In her stories, Davis includes women that are faced with various emotional predicaments, such as loss and love, but face the problems in different situations. A few of these problems are caused by the desire to love a man that has a negative impact upon their lives. Davis has an amazing ability to control different stories by making them unrealistic and interesting to draw the reader to a different world where they can witness strange events occurring, and imagine a “terrible laugh” that causes a movie theater

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In The Things They Carried O’Brien shows us that telling stories are essential for life because they help us remember and relive those moments that we cherish the most, or imagine a moment and make it into a moment that we desire. O’Brien shows how stories are essential for life throughout the story. One example is In The Lives of the Dead O’Brien talks about a moment of his childhood. He talks about a date that he went on with Linda. In this chapter O’Brien says, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others dream with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

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In a different part of the book, Vance transitions the mood by relaying another anecdote, this time with a completely different tone and diction. He discusses the sorrow he faced with losing his Mamaw, writing, “That was when I broke down and released the tears that I’d held back during the previous weeks” (172). Introducing a tone of despair adds variation to Vance’s writing and introduces an intimate side of the author, thus pulling the reader closer to the story. The different

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Date TMA received: Date returned: TUTOR’S REMARKS: Content Language and Organization Earned Mark EL121: The Short Story and Essay Writing TMA: Fall Semester 2015 - 2016 The ending of every short story represent a great significance for the short story itself.

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In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, after hearing the news of her husband’s death, Mrs. Mallard’s emotions did not portray sadness or despair instead she was relieved and rejoiced. Even though Mrs. Mallard admits that her husband was kind and loving, she feels joy after hearing the news of her husband’s death that she will no longer be known as Mrs. Mallard. Although it was acknowledged in the story that Louise Mallard loved Bentley Mallard, we can tell by the statement “had never looked save with love upon her,” (Chopin, 1894), the favor was not returned. The main theme we see in this story is the oppression of marriage. Death of her husband shows that Mrs. Mallard finally has freedom.

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