Post 4: The Unknown Soldier (page 274)

            I'm not quite sure what this story is about, and I think that's the way it's supposed to be. I both liked and disliked this passage. Each paragraph has a theme of it’s own and they tell a story in themselves. Each sentence is like a story of it’s own. You can link sentences in each paragraph to ones in the previous. This is a unique style of writing that makes you really wonder what’s going on. You never really find out because you have too many contradicting answers to choose from.

This story was very difficult to follow because it really didn’t make much sense. The subject and story changed in every sentence, which made it nearly impossible to understand. To follow the story, you can’t follow the direct information; you have to follow the theme of each paragraph. For example, in the first paragraph, it has a series of sentences starting with “The last thing I saw was…” This implies that the man is dying. So, that would be your first theme and the first piece of the story. At least, this is what I tried to do to follow the story (and it still didn’t work very well).

One thing I did like about this story, however, was how it made you want to keep reading. Since it jumped around so much, you wanted to see if it ever came to an end. You wanted to see if it ever resolved or started to make sense at one point or another. (It never did.) But it did leave a lot of room for imagination.

That’s one thing I would change about this story if I were the one writing it: I’d have a solid resolution. The point of a story is to tell the reader a story. If the reader can’t follow what you’re telling them, there’s not really much of a story.