"The House on Mango Street"- Video

"The House on Mango Street" video was actaully kind of inspirational. If you did not really understand the short story, then the video will definitely be able to clear it up. The video is very short, simple, and to the point which is why it is easy to comprehend. The first two questions the narrator speaks in the video are such great questions: "What kinds of stories would you tell about your house?" and "Have you ever wanted to grow up somewhere else?" When you think about it, those two lines literally explain the short story exactally. Towards the end of the clip, there is one more quote that also explains the short story very well also: "Do you want to be defined by your surroundings?" That is a perfect example of when the nun looked down on their house, and she got very uncomfortable.
This video is very, very clear and I honestly think that if you are having trouble understanding the main idea of the story, then this video will really help!

Ursula K LeGuin- Reading from her new novel LAVINIA

In all honesty, when I first opened the link for the video and saw that it was 10 minutes long, and that Ursula LeGuin was kind of old, I was literally dreading watching the clip! But, to my surprise I actaully liked it, and was very in to the video. LeGuin had a very warm personality which also made the video easier to watch.
It is kind of interesting, if we were to read this story on our own, we probably would not have read it in the exact same way that it was intended to be read in. So when you hear LeGuin read her own work, it is a much more clear perception, and a lot easier to understand.
Since both "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," and her public reading from her new novel "Lavinia," have similar tones, you can get a slight idea of how "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is supposed to be read.

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin & "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The tone of a story definatley affects how you read it, and how you picture the story in your mind. Both short stories "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin have similar tones.
Ursula K. LeGuin starts off her story with an uplifting kind of "feel good" tone. She makes the town of Omelas sound like a utopia. She gives a very clear description through out the story by using vivid details, and color. As the story come to an end, the tone switches to a more mellow mood as she eases you to a more depressing ending. At the very end of the story, even though the tone is still a bit up setting, she leaves us with what would be "the right thing to do" in Omelas when everyone else feels like they can not do anything for the child.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World", starts off very creepily when they discover kids playing with a dead corpse on the beach. As the story continues, you see a similar tone as LeGuin's story which is a feel good tone as they are decribing the town. You also feel like the people of the village are a bit naive. When they discover the man, just because he is "bigger", he is considered extremley different, pure perfection.
Both stories portray a lot of imagination, and description which makes the stories eaiser to read and more enjoyable.

"A Pair of Tickets" by Amy Tan & "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros

We are all products of our parents, and because of this, we all have different cultures that we cannot get out of.  Both "A Pair of Tickets" by Amy Tan, and "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros show different cultures and different families.  

Amy Tan's, "A Pair of Tickets" is about a girl who is Chinese and grows up in the United States. When her mother dies, she went back to China to live with her dad and her two twin sisters her mother had from her first marriage.  After being in China, and reuniting with her family, she kind of feels like she was "abandoned" for alot of her life because she was never involed with her family, and never that close with her mom for her to tell her stories.  

Sometimes family is really the only thing that actually matters.  "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros is a pretty sad story.  Her family lived in a small house, and when the house started breaking down, her parents promised her they would move into a "good" house that sounded beautiful when imagined, but no so great in real life.  Even though it wasnt what they had pictured, it was still a house to call their own home, and somewhere to sleep.  When someone talks negativly about her house she gets very upset, but when you go back and look it should not be how your living, but who your living with that makes everything matter.  

"Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid

When I actually sat down and thought about it, Girl by Jamaica Kincaid is kind of a sad short shory. 

The narration style is coming from her "boss"/ the family that she works for (since she is an Au Pair).  You can tell that, that is the narrator because of the way he is talking to her, and what he is saying to her.  You can almost kind of hear the way he is saying it too.  I call the narrator "he" because he describes girls to be very derogative; he uses the word "slut", which today is a very hurtful word to some people.  He does not really seem to care about what she has to say because every time she asks a question, he completely disreguards what she says.

"Girl" presents females as being inferior.  When you see how the boss talks to her, and what he says to her, its almost like she is a slave.  He basically tells her every thing she has to do with out taking a single break, and not answering, or paying attention to any of her questions or concerns.  He portrays girls as "sluts" which is a very dirty word, and offensive to most women.  Through out the story, he tells her how to conduct herself.  By the boss telling her this, he thinks that she does not know how to do it herself. The end of the story suprises me because, through out the story he tells her not to conduct herself in an unpolite manner, and then at the end when she asks a simple question he automatically assumes she is a bad person.

"The Appointment in Samarra" vs. "The Appointment"

The short story "The Appointment in Samarra" by W.Somerset Maugham and the video "The Appointment" actually have alot it common. For one thing, both titles are similar, and the morals are also just as similar.  The moral of "The Appointment in Samarra" was basically that you can not run from death; and the moral of the "The Appointment" was that no one can escape their future. I know that even though the morals sound like they really dont have any thing in common, when you have actually read the story, and watched the clip you realize they do.  

Maugham's short story is about a servant that goes to the market place for his master, and while he is there he bumps in to "Death".  The servant is startled and askes his master if he can take his horse to Samarra to "escape from his death". When the master approaches Death and askes him why he scared his servant, Death replied by saying "It was only a start to a suprise...I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."  Death was basically saying that the servant was going to die today whether or not he stayed in Baghdad.

The video "The Appointment" was about a kid who was turning 21.  As he and a friend were walking they approached a psychic who kept repeating, "You can not escape your future."  Later on in the video, she picks up a card with a knight riding his horse, and on the bottom it says, death.  That symbolizes that the boy is probably going to die, and he might try and run from it.

As you can see, both the short story and the video are both a little eerie, but at the same time both are 100% true!  You can not run from your future, or your death, but in reality you are actually running towards it.