Fiction Packet 3

I found these stories a little bit easier to understand than some of the previous ones we had to read. Even though they were easy to read for the most part, every person could have their own interpretation of each different story. The authors kind of left that part up to the reader.

The section I paid the most attention to was the Peter Markos section. There were three different stories technically but the same theme ran throughout. I took it as since they were from the same book that these individual stories were kind of like chapters in the book. I noticed in the first story  called When it Rains it Rains a River, that the word us brothers is used a lot. "Mud, us brother, we can't get enough mud." Through out the story the brothers are always referred to as us brothers. I think the author is trying to create unity between the brothers, making it seem like they are almost one person instead of multiple. Another theme that starts in this one and runs throughout the others is this idea of mud. In this one it is almost like we are made out of mud, "When Girl looks down to see the mud that she is made from.." Mud may be a metaphor for something else, which I have not yet discovered.

The second story, The Singing Fish, also continues on with the theme of mud. In this one I was reminded of cavemen and how they would communicate, since there wasn't really any spoken language yet. "Us brothers, what we see, inside this cave, we see pictures --stick-figure fish--on these mudcaved walls." This reminded me of hyderglifics and how cavemen would draw pictures on the walls of the caves to express something or to try and communicate with one another. In this story, mud is a shelter, a need for survival, which makes it very important in this certain story.

The third and final story What Our Mother Always Told Us, depicts mud in a negative way. The brothers love to play in the mud but, "What our mother always told us was, Don't, don't go, don't go get muddy, don't walk into this house with mud..." In this story mud is suppose to  be a bad thing. The mother doesn't want it in the house, she doesn't want the brothers to go get muddy. While in the second story mud was how we build our shelter and it was needed for communicating. Throughout the stories the meaning of the mud and the significance changes drastically, from the brothers needing it to create and survive, to it being a negative quality in life.