Anthology of Ideas

In Flannery O’ Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” a typical Georgia family go on vacation to Florida, but are murdered by an escaped convict named “The Misfit. In the following quote the protagonist explains why he calls himself “The Misfit.”

Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except he hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I committed one because they had the papers on me…of course…they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it . Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right.

Margaret Atwood uses her short story Happy Endings to show that it is not the end of a story that is important it is the middle. She seems to say that the endings are all cliché that the middle is the part that is unique. This holds true with literature versus a beach novel although a beach novel and piece of literature may end the same way it is the rest of the book that makes one different from the other.
As she says the true ending is “John and Mary die” the only guarantee in life is death. So since the ending is already known why does it have the tendency to “steal” the spotlight from the rest of the story? Sure in some cases people can guess the middle of a story from the ending, if they find someone died in an electric chair they can assume he committed a crime.

The First Law of Thermodynamics is: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it may be transformed form one form into another, but the total amount of energy never changes.” This law can be translated to say that because energy is finite then matter also is finite.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is: “in all energy exchanges some energy must be used to transfer the energy from an object with less energy to one with more energy.” This law can also be taken to mean that energy is used as energy is transferred.
Without most people even realizing it these two laws rule the world around us. The strive for energy and heat has caused wars between peoples of all technology levels. For without it few can survive. In our modern world oil is the energy producer of choice but oil will run out, energy trapped in its particles will be released back into the universe to serve as a different type of energy. For that is the fate of all things. Nothing ends and nothing begins; forms may change but everything is made out of pieces of the things that came before. Energy does not replenish itself, like water it can be used too quickly or too wastefully. What would happen if humankind achieved the ultimate goal, the harnessing of all energy, to have it at their command? Would it bring happiness or sorrow? Would it bring pleasure or pain? Could humans even be trusted with the possibility? There are no definitive answers, just dreams and fantasies.

The short story characteristically focuses on a single incident, a bit of action that is usually dramatic and ends in some sort of revelation”a flash of irony, comprehension, or insight. What happens is crucial and pivotal to the story. Because of its length if the story is to make a strong impression on us, it will do so not merely through the intensity of its concentrated action but through the implications the event suggests. This idea is expertly portrayed by three different authors in the short stories “Samuel”, “Battle Royal” and “The Use of Force”.

Samuel by Grace Paley is the story of a boy who was accidentally killed while playing on a train. The accident was caused when one rider pulled the brake cord of the train causing it to jerk to a stop, throwing Samuel from the rear of the train. This one person may or may not have purposefully intended to cause the injury.

Tolstoy accurately portrays the feelings that abound at the thought of an acquaintances death and the social necessities one must go through. The range of emotions is nearly identical for each person: equal parts of sympathy for the family, shock at the occurrence and relief that it was not a person in a closer relationship with oneself or oneself. If you have ever gone to a friend’s relatives funeral you probably know the feelings Tolstoy refers to, the only reason for appearing at the funeral is to be a good friend but there is no personal loss at the event. If anything it is more of a chore than anything else, one stands around look appropriately grim and give sympathetic smiles to people who actually knew the deceased. But the majority of the time the only thought one has is when it would be appropriate to escape.