Relationships: Forever or Never?

“The Evolution of my Brother” Quotes:

“Don’t forget me.” 

“Or forget me.”

“Or forget some of it. Or remember me. Whatever. It’s your life.”

Throughout the whole story, the narrator would get upset with her younger brother for wanting to always hang out with her, but at the end, she doesn’t want him to grow up just like her mother didn’t want her to grow up. As a middle child, I can relate to the story in both ways.

When I was younger, I always wanted to hang out with my older brother, but then I became okay with spending time alone. We are still close, but it’s not like we spend that much time with it just being the two of us. The quotes in the story are similar to that. She wants him to remember all of the moments that they spent together and wants him to still want to talk to her, but then she is okay with him forgetting her, but then she changes her mind again. The thing about having a sibling is that you will want to hang on to them forever, but as you get older, you find out that you can’t. Even though she is the older brother, she now realizes that she can’t control his life anymore. She knows that deep down she wants to still spend some time with him, but she also knows that he might not want to.

The quotations just show the complexities of a sibling relationship. Being an older sibling is hard sometimes and so is being a younger sibling, but this shows that no matter what happens at times, your siblings still want to be a part of your life. Just like earlier in the story when the father questions how they can go from fighting each other to saying that they are best friends, just because your sibling gets on your nerves at one point, doesn’t mean they don’t want to be with you at all. Is this how all relationships work or is that just with sibling relationships?

What it Means to be a Short Story

Edgar Allan Poe classifies the short story based on its “unity of effect and impression.” Building on

this idea, literary critic Brander Matthews (1901) adds that this “essential unity of impression”

“shows one action, in one place, on one day. A short story deals with a single character, a single

event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.”

Poe’s and Matthew’s definition of a short story isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t apply to all short stories. In fact, most of the short stories we read deal with more than “a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.” In Sherman Alexie’s “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” we see further, that the short story goes into different time periods as well. While there is a single situation being the death of Victor’s father, the short story is more complex than that. Not only does Alexie’s story deal with the situation in the present, but it also incorporates flashbacks into it as well. 

The story follows Victor and his old friend Thomas and as the story progresses we see that the story is more about their relationship than it is about the death of the father. In the first flashback Thomas tells Victor a story and then it ends with Victor saying, “I wish I could be a warrior,” (Alexie, 4) and Thomas responding “me too” (Alexie, 4). In the next flashback we see that before they turned fifteen they had “long since stopped being friends” (Alexie, 4). The complexity of their relationship is shown when Thomas still chooses to accompany Victor on his trip to claim his father’s belongings. Later on you find out that Thomas went “because of [Victor’s] father” (Alexie, 8). 

It is clear that while this story does support the definition of the short story that is given, there are many other aspects to a short story. The way that the short stories deal with time is different from the way that novels deal with time because in novels, the time is day-to-day mostly and you actually see both night and day. In a short story, if you progress through time, you jump and you only see one part of that time period.

The Evolution of my Family

I would give the story, “The Evolution of my Brother” by Jenny Zhang a different title.
Throughout the book, we do see how her brother evolves over time, but we also see how she evolves
from her childhood years to when she became an adult in college. Additionally, even though we don’t
really see an evolution in the parents, we do see an evolution in the family relationships. Therefore,
I believe the title should be, “The Evolution of my Family.”

The reasons for this change is that the family relationships in this story are all over the place.
In the beginning, when it was just the narrator and her parents, they were very indulgent and would
spend tons of money at Sizzler, but when her brother was born, they stopped eating so much and ate
more at home. Furthermore, we can see an evolution in the family because at the beginning, we can
see that the mother doesn’t want her daughter to go away, but then at the end, it seems that the
mother’s relationship with the narrator has gotten better, while her relationship with her brother has
gotten worse. The character we don’t really see is the Father.

Besides that, the character grows up and realizes that she too doesn’t want her brother to grow up,
realizing that this is exactly how her mother felt about her when she was just younger. Her parents
have to start paying her brother to speak to her and then in the end, the narrator figures out that she
cannot control her brother, no matter how much she wants to. We see more evolution in the family
relationships than we do in the brother alone.

Sentence Analysis: Too Frightened to be Cowards

“They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in
many respects this was the heaviest burden of all” (Tim O’Brien, 262).

“It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards”
(Tim O’Brien, 262).

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a short story about a squadron where it describes all that the
soldiers carry and shows how devastating a war can be. While there are some things that they carry that
are the same, other things are unique to each person. 

Saying that “the object was not valor” in a short story about war is showing that going to war is not
something that should be praised. While we hear and see people eager to join the army and excited to
fight, that is not what military service is like. By using the phrase “they” these sentences are showing
that there is a communal aspect to the military. None of them wanted to be seen as cowards and so
instead of them seeing it as bravery, they see it as they are more afraid of being afraid than they are of
being in the war. It is similar to doing something you don’t want to because you are afraid to challenge
the system. 

Additionally, throughout the story we see the main character constantly giving us the exact weights
of the items that they have to carry and it adds up to dozens of pounds, but then he says that the secret
cowardice is “in many respects… the heaviest burden of all”. When somebody is going through
many different things emotionally, then people would say that they are under a lot of pressure. The
fact that someone in the army would admit that something in the mind can weigh more than something
that they have to physically carry shows just how potent emotions are and how burdensome negative
emotions can be, not only on a person’s emotional state, but on their physical well-being.
This short story does not paint the picture of war being full of battle and glory. The picture some
people believe it to be. The soldiers are actually real people and they carry things that they believe they
need. Sometimes they actually need to carry an object because it pertains to a certain mission or task
they have to complete like all of the weapons they carry, but other things like candy, a bible, pictures,
and the finger from a dead kid, they think they need. Since we don’t know them and since it’s a story,
we can only analyze why they might need such an object, but the actual value of that object isn’t
known. It’s easy to see everyone in the army as bad or if they aren’t bad, to not see them as individuals,
but from these sentences and the short story we can see that they are regular people who at the end of
the day, have to deal with some of the same issues as others. Furthermore, it’s not like they enjoy killing
people or they enjoy being in the war, rather “they were too frightened to be cowards.” That being
said, “The Things They Carried” is showing that not everybody in the army is all gung-ho, and they
still feel emotions like everyone else. Just because they carry weapons of mass destruction, doesn’t
mean they don’t carry the doubt, fear, and other emotions that plague all of humanity.

Post-Apocalyptic Criticism

Is apocalyptic fiction criticizing the idea of going with the crowd and sticking to the norm?

Both “The Comet” and “The Machine Stops” have examples of ways that following the norm doesn’t

benefit anybody. In “The Comet”, Dubois wrote about something that directly contrasted what the norm was at

the time. In addition, in “The Machine Stops” we see how just letting things blow over and just accepting

things as they are isn’t going to help anything. It is interesting how in one case we see humanity completely

fall, while in the other one we see the main characters returning to reality and descending their elevated

position and their elevated state. Furthermore, as Jim and Julia became more comfortable with each other they

became, in a way happier, despite there being death all around them. That is just like how Kuno became

happier when he began to figure out how to sense space and when he went to the surface. In both cases, we see

that even though the norm is comfortable, breaking out of your comfort zone can make you happier.

In “The Comet”, the normal is a race divide. The reaction we see from Jim is one of bitterness because

“yesterday… she would scarcely have looked at him twice” (Dubois 127). However, Julia’s reaction is one of

surprise as, “he dwelt in a world so far from her” (Dubois 127). The experiences of both Jim and Julia are

vastly different thus, at first they stay with each other out of fear of being alone. But then they start to see past

the other’s race and become more at ease with one another. Julia notices “how foolish our human distinctions

seem” (Dubois 131) when she and Jim are at the precipice of their elated state. The scene on the roof is a bit

like the Reconstruction period after slavery was abolished. For a few years after slavery was abolished black

people were free and mostly had all the same rights as white people, but then it went back to being almost just

as bad as when slavery was legal. Just when Jim and Julia were thinking that they could start a new humanity

that didn’t rely on human distinctions, they were brought back to the way things were where a black man

shouldn’t even look at a white woman even if they were the last people on earth.

In “The Machine Stops” Forster makes the normal doing whatever the machine allows. The normal is

staying inside each of their respective rooms, obeying the Machine, and just going with the flow. In the

beginning Vashti practically obeys the machine and in a way, her obedience can be seen as worship. Following

the norm was such to the people that they had to “beware… first-hand ideas” (Forster 70). Then when the

machine started to fail, they just let it happen with the belief that it would get better, but in the end it didn’t. In

the end those who relied on the machine ended up dying, but those on the surface ended up being the ones who

survived. That shows that to a more extreme scale that going with the crowd might lead to comfort in the

moment, but in the long run, it will lead to more pain. That is similar to how we are producing all this pollution

because of laziness and trying to be really comfortable at the moment, but a century from now, we don’t know

if the earth will still look like this. 

In both of these apocalyptic short stories we see that there is a difference between the way that not going with the crowd is presented, but they both get the point across. In “The Comet” Jim and Julia are able to find a short happiness in light of all the death around them and they even begin to see each other in terms other than race. Instead of criticizing following the norm, what Dubois is doing is closer to showing what could be if we decided to go against what is seen as normal. On the same note, “The Machine Stops” is showing more of what happens when you don’t do things for yourself and you keep other s make your decisions for you the way that everybody besides Kuno let the Machine dictate what they did like it was a person. In different ways, both of the stories are showing that change is possible, but in order to be achieved we might have to give up a few of our comforts.