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Summary Of ' A Pair Of Tickets '

Decent Essays

Travis Marzina
Professor Stephen Graf
ELIT 1050
2 November 2014
Short Fiction Response Paper How much can a story differ if someone else tells it? Moreover, just how much can we get out of a story based on narrative voice alone? After reading “A Pair of Tickets” by Amy Tan and “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, it is clear that narrative viewpoint truly drives the emotions and understanding a reader experiences while reading. Both “A Pair of Tickets” and “Cathedral” are told from a first person viewpoint, and that dictates the tone and message the story sends to readers. “A Pair of Tickets” is a story about a middle-aged woman who is embarking on her first trip to China. The 36-year old woman named Jing-Mei never really embraced the idea of being Chinese. She notes that in middle school all of her friends talked about how they were more Chinese than she was. The bulk of the story takes place while Jing-Mei is en route to China, and along the way her father who is accompanying her on the trip tells her several stories about her recently deceased Chinese mother. As the story progresses, Jing-Mei begins to embrace her Chinese heritage, and realizes that although she was raised with an American way of thinking, it does not truly define who she is or has o be. The emotion the narrator in “A Pair of Tickets” had was brought forward instantly in the beginning of the story. In the second line alone, the narrator (Jing-Mei) says that she can feel the skin on her forehead tingling and

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