The short story “The Dogs” written by Hanif Kureishi is a nightmarish scenario of a Mother and her son being eaten alive by dogs. The short story was reproduced with a different meaning and intent in the film directed by Ronald J. Wright. In the original short story version, I noticed that is very vague and seems like the author has purposely done this to allow the reader to create hidden meanings using their imagination to infer different meanings to the story. On the other hand, in the film, there are details added such as more dialogue, sounds that add to the mood and character development. Therefore, both the short story and film adaptation of the “The Dogs” portray the horrors of modern society and the fear of not being able to protect …show more content…
The story being vague leaves many questions for the reader to think about such as, “Where is she going and why?”, “Who is this man that she mentions?”, and “Why is her son going with her to meet this man?”. In addition, because of vagueness, I am forced to find hidden meanings behind different sentences. In like manner, the short story introduces many new ideas and potential ideas, however it has very little evidence of backing-up those ideas. Moreover, I believe it is crucial for short stories to have a great amount of details because of the limited number of words. Therefore, Kureishi’s intent is to create a feeling of mystery and to create questions for the reader’s imagination to answer. From reading the short story, Kureishi wanted to portray the loss of power and the inability to protect loved ones. I believe that Kureishi effectively used the role of the mother and son specifically to represent the inability to protect your loved ones. This is shown when it is read that the mother is eaten alive along with her son while trying to protect him from barbaric dogs. Kureishi used the role of the mother and the son rather than using, for example, a young female and her boyfriend, it is more powerful to show love through a mother’s desire to protect her