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.