Unit 8

There were two common elements that were apparent in all three short stories for this unit. The first element was how fast all three authors presented death towards the ending of their respective stories. For example, when Ignacio Padilla concludes the story by announcing Donald Campbell’s sudden death in The Antipodes and the Century, he decides to also bring on a presumed sandstorm to the replica Edinburgh and bury the sand city. In Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, the instructor for the narrator suddenly stabs him in the stomach for ending of the story. Let’s also not forget Yoko Ogawa’s ending in Labcoats in which the secretaries’ friend randomly announces she killed the doctor that she had an affair with for forcing her to wait for him to start his divorce. If read carefully, there is a minor element that the three authors share with death; how comfortable the characters reacted when death (or violence) happened. As for the second element, the directness of the dialogue for all the stories was very common. Although The Antipodes and the Century required more reading and a little more effort to understand than the two other stories, it was very clear to understand what was going on in the text and understand what their backgrounds are. In speaking of backgrounds, Hassan Blasim’s background was more evident in his story; by considering his past life in Iraq and the amount of violence in The Corpse Exhibition, it was easy to understand how Hassan was able to create such a disturbing and violent dialogue.  Since I do not have much background on Japanese culture and history, it was a little difficult to understand how she was inspired to write a story that started out as innocent and ended very horrifically. I believe Ignacio’s background was not shown at all in The Antipodes and the Century because from the interpretation I was able to create, there were no representation of his Mexican background. Coming from a Mexican family, it was very hard to find any indication that he was from Mexico.