Critique on "Lost"

Sara Angela Rodriguez

A415-002/Chambers

Student Critique/ Lost Reward of my eternal gratitude

4/26/2013

When I first saw the title of this piece I imagined it would be similar to a lost dog or a lost cat ad, but instead of an animal you would be looking for your “Reward of my eternal gratitude”. Think that the reason I thought this was because the word “Lost”, which I assumed was the title of the piece, was so closely located to the text and because it was the only other thing set apart by the font styling. As I read on I was pleasingly surprised that it was not the gratitude that was lost, but a person, which gave this piece a nice twist. Here I must say that I really like the format of the first page and I really liked the prose of the story, but I wished that you could have combined the two. After seeing the categorical descriptions on the first page (i.e. “Personality”, “Breed”, “Age”, etc.) we never see any indication that this piece was meant to mimic a lost sign until the very end. I think that instead of bookending your piece with the lost sign characteristics you should include them throughout your piece. One way you can do this is by putting your prose into categories of just trying to put everything on one page to make it look more like a lost sign. Another suggestion I have for your piece is to add a picture of the lost person. On lost signs there is usually a picture of the lost person or lost pet between the “Lost” and the descriptive section. This would make your piece look and feel more like a sign apart from that, I think your piece is brilliant. I really lived the homoeroticism (whether it was intentional or not) that was expressed, it’s unique and so far I haven’t read anything like that in this class. I think that you should keep that quality in your piece, but that you should definitely clear up the fact that we are looking for a human and that the narrator is a man. At times, especially because of the pet like description of Jack and the language used by the narrator, I felt that I was reading a piece where a woman was looking for her lost lover or a woman was looking for a pet or a combination of everything really. But once again, I really enjoyed your piece, keep up the good work!