Sara Angela Rodriguez
A415-002/Chambers
Student Critique/ Things in a Shooting Gallery
3/12/2013
I loved your piece! I think that you did a great job
mimicking Lydia Davis’s piece (Extracts
from a Life). I especially liked how this piece was set up, the narrative
story that is. We journeyed with this character from her youth to her adulthood
and I really enjoyed the journey. I feel that with the Davis piece we only got
a slice of Shinichi’s life, but with your piece we go further. This leads me to
my next topic: the issue of gender in the piece. I think that it was a good choice
to make your character a female character and an even better choice to keep the
gender hidden until half-way through the piece. I think that because of the stereotypes
we have in our society we automatically assumed that the narrator was a male. Because
of this I didn’t have much interest in the first half of the piece. I assumed
that it was going to be a typical boys and guns story. But, when the character
was revealed to be female I had to go back and read the parts I had already
read, but in a different state of mind. It made me think twice about these stereotypes
(especially when we came to the question in the ‘marksmen’ section about what
you should call a female shooter). Honestly, I loved your the piece. I found
nothing in it that seemed like it needed to be changed. I feel like you know
exactly where you are going with this. Though, I do have one thing that does bother
me: the ‘mijo’ in the section entitled “They’re
called Marksmen, Mijo.” Who is this mijo (son in Spanish)? Why is he being
addressed? What relevance does he have to the story? Was it just a typo? Did you
mean to say mija (daughter in Spanish)?
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