Yat Hung Leung (Louis)

Psychoanalysis LENG-201-017
Mark Polanzak
November 30th, 2014
Reading Response 8 Response Paper to four stories
Frist of all, I will talk about the story By the Creek by Barry Yourgrau. It is a
story talking about boys stealing their fathers heads when his father was sleeping. He
showed his new look to his mother and made her cried. He then went back to his
parents bedroom and looked at his father for a while. After that, he went to the creek and
met his other five friends, who also have stolen their fathers heads.
The story giving us a message that children will have the same characteristics of
their parents when they grow up. The influence of family is so great that the boy exactly
took his fathers head and put it on his shoulder. Parents are the models of their kids.
The story also uses first narrative. It gives us a more interior feeling. When I was
reading it, I felt like I was the character describing by Yourgrau and the head I was
wearing was my father. Using first narrative gives us a more intimate feeling when we
are reading the story.
Moreover, the whole passage is very concise and brisk. It changes the places from
home to parents bedroom to creek within two paragraphs. In the meantime, the mood is
changing from proud excitement to hurt indignation to certain playfulness, and every step
feels entirely complete and rich in detail.
The second story is Veinticinco de agosto, 1983 by Jorge Luis Borges.
The story is base on the narrator meeting his old-self. The old narrator started the

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discussion by telling the narrator that this was his last dream. The old narrator told the
narrator every thing, which would happen in his future. For instance, he would be left
alone in this house; he would return to Iceland However, when the old narrator asked
what the most terrible moment of their life had been, they both lied. More interesting,
they both understood that they lied to each other. The truth is that we are two and we are
one. Said by the old narrator. This made the narrator understood that his old-self was
really true.
The third story that I would like to talk about is Some of Us Had Been
Threatening Our Friend Colby by Donald Barthelme. The story opens by telling the
reasons why Colby would be decided to hang by his so called friends. It was because
Colby had gone too far for some reasons. Then the main passage of the story is talking
about the discussion of the event. They first talked about the music Colby would like to
be played at the hanging, and then the wording of the invitations and drinks serve. The
next item of business was the gibbet and painting. And on and on they discussed about
the transportation, location, hangman, wire or rope. The final paragraph mentioned the
success of the hanging event and the fact that nobody has ever gone too far anymore.
The story did not mention what Colby has done before. It did not explain what he
had gone too far from the beginning until the end when the narrator wrote, the fact that
nobody has ever gone too far again. As gone too far has never been explained, we
would have a sense of guessing and let some space for readers to think of or create.
However, not matter what that is, nobody would do it later because they did not want to
be hanged.

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The story also talks about the humor of being reasonable. It appeared the first
time in the first paragraph when Colby, Howard and the narrator discussed about the
music. Colby said Ivess Fourth Symphony but Howard said this was a very difficult
piece, requiring a large size of the orchestra and chorus and putting the crew way over the
music budget. Be reasonable, he said to Colby. Then the remaining story is talking
about other details very reasonably. For example, they had a perfect moral right to hang
Colby because he was a friend of them, belonged to them and he had after all gone too
far. They did not hire a hangman because they did not know if there were any free-lance
hangmen wandering around the country. Or if they hired a hangman from other countries,
they did not know if the man was a professional, real hangman. Besides, they chose to
use rope instead of wire because the wire would injure the tree, cut into the branch it was
tied to when Colbys full weight hit it. In these days of increased respect for the
environment, they did not want that happen.
However, these all so called reasonable discussions were based on one fact,
which is hanging Colby is also reasonable. Certainly the author deliberately hide this
truth so that the story can create a sense of humor and new thoughts, as no certain people
have thought about the process of hanging a friend.
The final story is the Rememberer by Aimee Bender. It talks about the reverse
evolution experienced by Annies lover. When the day Annie met Ben, he became a
baboon, then a sea turtle and finally a salamander. Annie thought Ben has no memory so
that she let Ben swim out in the beach. She really wanted him to come back but somehow
she could not see him anymore.

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Annies role is to give the account of this evolution and to share her feelings of
loss, grief, and acceptance. She also consults with science to try to understand why this
would happen and how long it would take. The story also uses some unreal situation such
as reverse evolution and Ben has a job and friends until he begins to shed a million years
a day.
The story is short but very precise. The story uses around 1400 words to describe
the whole process of reverse evolution. It talks about people are all getting too smart.
And the world dries up and dies when theres too much thought and not enough heart.
However, Annie loves Ben because she loves his knowledge instead of his body. They
had sex for the first time but soon they fell into the discussion of poetry. When he became
an ape, he could no longer talk with Ben. Therefore, she was depressed. This story
ironically talks about the simply wrong love between human.

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