This week we were given another round on stories to analyze and dissect. “Cat N Mouse”, “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman”, “The Room In The Attic”, and “Dangerous Laughter”. The story that stood out the most to me was “The Room In The Attic”. This story had me hanging onto every word and I found it very enjoyable.
The story starts off describing a character named Wolf. We are already aware that the story is not about him, but the author chooses to start off describing him because of his importance in the story. The story is actually about a boy named David, and we start out by describing their dynamic as friends. Something that I noticed in the story was that Wolf and David did not really hang out with one another when David’s other friends were present. Their friendship was very odd to me because it seemed so different, they were an unusual but usual pairing in my opinion because they had so many things in common, but Wolf was not the type of person that David usually surrounded himself with. It makes me wonder if David’s “regular” friends (Ray and Dennis) knew that he liked to read and how he was often caught in deep thought as the story progresses.
The story continues with David meeting Wolf’s sister, Isabel. This part of the story was very intriguing to me and is the main reason I chose to write this blog post about it. The dynamic between Isabel and David was confusing at first to me. He was allowed to meet her, but it was in complete darkness. It gave me the impression that Isabel was very fragile, there was something that must be wrong with her. My other impression was that she must be some sort of creature that is not of this world, or, like our other stories, she turned into some animal or beast. I was afraid that his first couple of times meeting her would result in Wolf or Isabel herself feeling disrespected by something he did and this story taking a dark turn. The story does give off a certain vibe that there is much that we do not know about this family, the father was rarely brought up and the mother brought up many questions in my mind. There was a lot of suspense whenever David would go to meet Isabel and I think that’s something the author wanted. You never knew what was going to happen next and that is exactly what kept me reading and waiting for the moment that David actually got to see who Isabel was or what she wasn’t. I was nervous to see wha would happen to David when he did see Isabel and what that would mean for him.
The end of the story was something that I was not expecting. David was given the choice to see Isabel, but he did not take it. He allowed it to continue being a mystery which I understand, but why? It was something that he had questioned for so long, something he daydreamed about. He seemed to be almost obsessed with the idea of Isabel, but when he was finally able to see her especially in a moment that seemed very important to her, he left her. At the end of the story David continues his life and he continues living as if this was not something that was major in his life, almost forgetting about the details that took place as a whole. It made me think about David’s character and what the author wanted to portray here. Did he want the reader to see David as selfish or was it really just the need for mystery?