The Fifth Story

     One story, five different approaches?  Or five stories, and only one approach?  That being to totally confuse it's readers.  Or maybe it's not even a story at all.

     The first opens up with a bland, boring, and a straight-to-the-point version of the story.  The narrator is complaining about how her apartment is infested by a band of cockroaches.  A friend overhears and gives her a simple recipe on how to kill them.

     In the second version of the story, the narrator contemplates the morality of killing cockroaches.  They crawl up the pipes from downstairs, they don't even know of her existence, and they mind their own business.  So why is she so worked up over them if they don't even give her a second thought, or a first for that matter?

     In the third story, the cockroaches are no longer cockroaches anymore but a dehumanized, no feelings, inanimate thing.  They become statues, lifeless objects.  The narrator then compares them to the statues from Pompeii, where inevitable disaster overtook them, exactly the the cockroaches.

     In the fourth, the narrator realizes that this one act of exterminating the cockroaches could lead to more.  One night of killing can't be the solution, maybe only a handful of cockroaches died and their is yet to be an end.  Maybe the killing will never stop.  At this point in the story, the narrator begins to over exaggerate the reality of the situation.

     Last but not least, the fifth story starts off with its title, being "Leibnitz and the Transcendence of Love in Polynesia."  Considering the fact that the title of this whole thing is, "The Fifth Story," I would assume that everything boils down to this one story.  In conclusion, I think that the author was trying to explode our minds.  Every story opens up and explains that she's complaining about some cockroaches.  Then we get a different interpretation, feeling, and tone of her heart towards the killings.  But then the fifth story just gives us a title and ends with the beginning of all the other stories, "I was complaining about the cockroaches."  Maybe the author just wants us to make up our own ending with the little clues already given.  Either way, I really enjoyed reading this story, it didn't help me at anything like broadening my view of literature, it was just a good read.

Fiction Writing

     I personally feel that fictional stories are what keep us human.  Fiction keeps us sane and grounded from this life.  This may sound really weird, so let me explain.  We as a whole, tend to become, for lack of better words (more like, because I've always wanted to say that, but I digress) We become non-human, or less human.  We live life by constant worrying.  We always stress out when the next paycheck will come in.  We seek stability by keeping ourselves busy.  And I feel that fictional stories are what help our non-humane lives of always working, and stressing, and going mad.

     Fiction has always been the genre of literature that we run to in order to escape this wretched so-called life of ours.  We leap over this abyss of time and space and camp out in a new world, all found in the imagination of our little minds.  In other words, it's normal in this day and age to be that guy who stresses over hardship.  And that is, in my opinion, an insane way to live.  What bothers me is that it's normal, which is why opening up a fairytale, novel, or just a book in general,  helps to keep us sanely human.

     Sir Ken Robinson said a lot of things on TED Talk so I'll just paraphrase his 20 minute speech.  This is what he said, "Kids will take a chance.  They're not frightened of being wrong.  If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.  And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.  They have become frightened of being wrong.  We stigmatize mistakes.  And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.  We are educating people out of their creative capacities.  Picasso once said, 'All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.'  We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it."

Fiction is our thoughts, imaginations, and ideas written down.  In the end, I just feel like I'm rambling and not making any sense.  Maybe we should just all drink a Capri-Sun once and a while.  Maybe then life will get better.  The End.