Critique on "What Was is Gone"

Sara Angela Rodriguez

A415-002/Chambers

Student Critique/What Was is Gone

4/26/2013

This piece is modeled after one of our reading, Currents. It tells the story of a New Orleans couple who has had to evacuate for Hurricane Katrina and ended up staying in a cheap motel. They settle down to celebrate the wife’s, Rhonda, birthday only to find out that their home and everything they know are now “underwater” and that the city is “just absolute chaos”. I think that you did a very good job with the structure of the story and you succeeded in telling the story from finish to beginning. However, I do wish that the cause of this couple’s devastation, the hurricane, would not be revealed until later in the story. I feel that if you took away the “…underwater…looting, murder…just absolute chaos” in the first section that the reader would be even more shocked in the end to find out that a hurricane, and not some civil or domestic dispute was the cause of Rhonda’s crying. I also wish that the sections were not so direct. Through the piece Rhonda is staring at the television and crying, so we know that she is looking at everything that it unraveling in the news, but I think that this piece would work better if you had both Rhonda and Al walking around interacting with people at stores, restaurants, banks, etc. I think that by finding out what from piecing clues together, by seeing evacuees enrolling their children in schools or seeing relief support volunteers gathering, for example we can get a stronger understanding and feel for their situation. What I really like about this piece is the nonchalant manner in which it ends. I wish that this ‘air’/ ‘vibe’ of relaxation could slowly emerge as the piece goes backwards: from destruction and panic to seeing the relief volunteer and worry to planning a birthday party and calm.