Midterm 132

Midterm 132

Tyree Proctor
English 132
10/17/2011
Midterm Exam
1. Something Old: I think to be considered a piece of “flash fiction”, it has to have the element of surprise or some form of it, it can’t be too long for the reader to distracted from it, and it has to be open ended. One story that would fit this description would be
Something New: That most pieces of flash fiction somehow relates to our personal experiences in our lives. These stories are more like slices of life or the fairy tales. One of the stories like the “Machine of Death” represents that slice of life because it’s something we all can relate to, but it’s in fictionalized form. The story we read on the Cancer story is something that most of us can relate to, but we do not go to the machine to find out.
The story is just a few pages in length so it can be read quickly. It links our experiences since most of us have probably some connection to cancer in some way. This woman goes up to the machine and discovers she is dying at the cancer. This story is basically the avoidance of the inevitable even though it was going to happen sooner. We all want to know something that we want to prevent, but in terms of death, we rather not know because knowing may make us do things that we may have never done unless we knew that we were dying in just a short amount of time. This woman did not find out that she was dying till the very end of the story. That link is connected to us because we tend that we do not want to know the way we will die, or do we want to know when will that happen. Its been a taboo topic throughout history which has not been made easier with all the tragedy that has surrounded us. However, cancer has been turned into to hope with people trying hard to find a cure for it, and living as survivors till the very end.
Something Borrowed; Suzanne summed it up best that flash fiction was about the element of surprise, and I agree with that statement because they way authors left it open to...

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