I read “The Room in The Attic” and “Dangerous Laughter” by Steven Millhauser. In both of these stories, being restless and wanting more was a common theme. In “The Room in The Attic” a boy in high school is living a secret life. In school he acts normal and hangs out with his friends but when he is at the library or home, he is secretly reading books. One day he meets a new boy at the school who reads too but out in public. The new boy is Wolf and takes the boy. Dave to his house. There he meets Wolf’s sister Isabelle who sleeps in the attic. Every time Dave hangs out with Isabelle, he craves more into the unknown. Her room is completely dark, and Dave can see Isabelle, but he does not care.
He starts thinking that he is living in two parallel worlds. One with Isabelle and one without Isabelle. I love to read and the books that I read take me to different places then the one I am at. Books take me to another so I can escape from reality. I want to know more on what is happening next but at the same time I don’t want to know. When I read, I imagine on what the characters look like in real life, but I know that they will look different than what I have imagine.
Dave wants to know what Isabelle looks like at first but then he changed his made but that did not stop him from imaging on what she looked like and what she was wearing. At the end when she was going to show herself to him, he ran away and did not come back until he realize that Wolf did not come to school for a while. He did not want to know the truth of want she looked like because he did not want his image of her destroyed.
When we are stuck in our world, we do not want to see things differently than what we have imagined. We are in a bubble that fits arounds us and expands when we want to know more but when somethings happen, we do not want to believe then the bubble closes around us. We want to know more about a bout the world but when we see dark and bad things happening, we run away and try our best to forget the bad memorious and focus on happy things.