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Emotions In George Bowering's A Short Story

Decent Essays

Literary fictional works are strange in that readers are enveloped in a new world. This new world becomes vivid as one reads along, and emotions are evoked. George Bowering’s metafictional short story “A Short Story” conjures feelings of frustration and surprise in readers. Through the use of an unconventional narrative structure readers are manipulated into believing and mirroring Donna’s hatred. Despite the evident warning within the story, it is not until the end that one realizes these feelings were controlled by Bowering.
The first word in “A Short Story” is the heading “Setting” (1), which is the first of many distractions Bowering exploits. Each heading distracts readers from the actual plot as it draws focus to the literary technique. For example, in the heading section of “Characters” (1) I focused on Art and Audrey’s surface characteristics, such as Art’s “tanned [and] muscled” (1) body and Audrey’s dyed “brownish-red” (1) hair. It was not until the second time I read the story that I realized Art and Audrey’s physical characteristics are not the most important details of the “Characters” section. The crucial detail being the absence of Donna in the section. Donna is mentioned briefly when the narrator explains how Audrey wore her hair when “Donna was five” (2). Referring to Donna at the end of the “Characters” portion places her as an afterthought, a character not worthy of being described in a section specifically dedicated to illustrating characters. When I

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