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As a younger schoolgoer, I hated English class. First it was my natural expertise at spelling and grammar that bored me; then it was the constraining styles of writing that frustrated me (Five-paragraph essays are WORTHLESS). However, as a younger student, I also enjoyed the reading portion of the class. I liked the novels they gave me to read. I enjoy childish, fairy-tale type stories, the stories with conflict and fighting and difficulties, but a somehow happy ending (or sometimes not very happy, but somehow satisfying). They also stick to themselves. They don’t try to reach out and mess with me, or point to things outside of itself.

As I’ve gotten closer to college level classes, however, things have changed. The average writer’s skill gets closer to my own, so more freedom is allowed, and I can use my skills as much as I please. Writing is a pleasure, even those boring essays. The situation has… inverted.

So has the reading situation.

College-level literature isn’t hard. It is not particularly difficult for me to understand. It’s merely intolerable. I hate it.

I like to read a story that’s only a story. I like to read a novel that’s all about plot and characters, and whose plot advances by a character’s actions, not by what happens to them. (If you can’t imagine a story that advances by events, think of tragedies - all the characters seem to just be watching each other die.) I like a story that’s told for the sake of the story, like the Dark Tower, like Night’s Dawn, like Orson Scott Card’s books and Stephen King’s books and Robert Heinlien’s (spelling…?) books, not these collages of symbols and themes.

Yes, themes are everywhere, sometimes themes and symbols are there without us even thinking about it. That happens. I’m talking about stories like Daisy Miller by Henry James, or The Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. The former is a short story about an innocent, uncultured American girl in the carefully structured European society, who ignores the social rules and does as she pleases. Such a character is amusing, and an excellent device for plot developments in a larger-scale novel, but a story that focuses entirely on her becomes a magnifying glass that points to an issue I already know is there. I don’t want to read magnifying glasses, that’s not what I picked up, what I picked up was a book.

The Occurrence is also a short story about a Confederate man to be hung on a Union-controlled bridge for attempting to burn it down. What really wrecked this one for me is the way our teacher tore it apart. The man’s mind weaves a vast and unlikely escape from the noose; it has the Dark Tower-esque moments of outdoing the experts, as he evades the gunmen by diving, and he eventually reaches his home; however, at that moment, his mind is jerked back to reality as he realizes he has truly died. I wouldn’t mind this story if I just read it. It was pretty cool. The class turned it into a horrific mutilation of “literature”; it went from a story to an essay in third-person.

It is obvious that the story is intended to be symbolic of various things, particularly at certain parts, rather than merely a realistic portrayal of what the author thought would happen. The character makes it ashore and finds a road, for example; evidently this road is symbolic of the ‘road to death’, for we see no other way to go, but we can’t tell where it leads. I don’t care, frankly! The man found a road!

Worst of these symbols was when the man rose from the water after his noose broke. He took a great breath of air, then screamed. I wasn’t sure what that was about when I read it, but the class - and I don’t mean after consideration, I mean the teacher asked what it meant and someone immediately knew - told me that it was supposed to be symbolic of the beginning of life. What to babies do when they are born? They take a big breath and start screamin’. That was a “headdesk” moment. I don’t care about your little symbols and comparisons. They have nothing to do with the story at hand and that’s all I want to read. Why on earth would you even include something like that?!

It’s becoming clear that I will not like this class.

One of our next long reads will be The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I have Roman eyes, especially during lectures, so I already know at least one premise of the story and I know how it ends, so if you’ve read this at some point, please feel free to warn me if it’s bad or let me know if it will be tolerable, because based on what I have read, it will be an exercise of patience and teeth-gnashing.