Archive: Story Experiences

Promising Young Woman
Experience: Righteousness
Narrative Technology: Revenge Plot
The main character's method of revenge is masterful and designed to honor the memory of her friend who was wronged
Contributed by: mi
January 9, 2025
Thyestes
Experience: Righteousness
Narrative Technology: Revenge Plot
"O my Imagination! Hatch a deed so far beyond the norm that posterity will never forget."
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
Père Goriot
Experience: Righteousness
Narrative Technology: Revenge Plot
"The novel culminated with the burial of its title character, Father Goriot, a kindly pasta merchant who'd spent all his wealth to keep his daughters happy. Yet the daughters were too self-involved to attend Father Goriot's funeral, and even the priest himself wasn't interested; after reciting the short prayer he'd been paid to perform, he fled the scene unceremoniously. Soon there remained only one mourner, young Eugene Rastignac, to shed a melancholy tear" (Fletcher 235) (determining to avenge this insult by seducing one of the ungrateful daughters)
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
Experience: Righteousness
Narrative Technology: Moral Suasion
"For a young boy, it was too much for me to bear…My heart almost broke with grief…I was born a slave--and many a time, like old Job, I've cussed the day I was born" and "She would beat me until I could hardly stand…. They whipped me until I hardly had any feeling....Master become a very devil--he 'bused me and other folks most all-killin'ly" (114).
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
Fun Home
Experience: Released Emotion Brake
Narrative Technology: Opportunity to Observe + Pivot into Positive Emotion
Surreal moments (Bechdel's father was killed by a Sunshine bread delivery truck), Shocking moments (Bechdels' father striking his children), and an opportunity to find the source of Bechdel's father's abusive behavior in his repressed homosexuality, before concluding with a realization filled that releases positive emotions
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
Alcestis
Experience: Released Emotion Brake
Narrative Technology: Opportunity to Observe + Pivot into Positive Emotion
Alcestis dies and the play opens with his funeral. Apollo arrives to bring Alcestic back, but death still carries Alcestis away. Then Hercules shows up and doesn't recognize that he's at a funeral and people are in mourning. This goes on for a bit until someone lets Hercules know that he's behaving inappropriately and he decides to save Alcestis and succeeds.
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
The Metamorphosis
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: Poetic Narrative
The Metamorphosis takes a familiar happening--a young man living at home with his family--and turns the young man into a giant bug....no explanation is given for the rearrangement of man to bug. Its purpose isn't to logically establish new laws of narrative; it's to surprise us into reconsidering the old. That old law, in the case of The Metamorphosis, is family love. In the past, we'd been taught by moral parables, sentimental novels, and other traditional tales that family love was selflessly generous. But when the insectoid young man of The Metamorphosis repulses his parents and retreats heartbroken into his room to die, we relearn that family love can be very conditional indeed.
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: Poetic Language
"A river of waters diaphanous" "stones white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs"..."sparrow hands"..."the learned alchemists"..."the desperation of nails and screws"
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025