"Ideas" and "The Nice Little People"

    These two stories I chose to compare on purpose because the feeling of ambiguity it leaves you with after you finish that last sentence. Patricio Pron who wrote "Ideas" and Kurt Vonnegut who wrote "The Nice Little People" both left you wondering after you read were they just crazy, or did that actually just happen Obviously from a critical readers point of view im going to break teh stories down into their most symbolic state and try to analyze what each author is trying to say. Starting off with Pron. Pron's story was telling your about this extremely small town in Sterberode where one day a father hears his son, Peter, come home for school one day, but never sees him after that. The father goes all around the town creating search groups and not stopping till h finds his son. However in the midst of this story Pron decides to share another small story with us about a women who goes mad and claims her son is dead. We come to learn that that women never had a son. I enjoy how Pron introduced his ideas of children bluntly, "We [children] are all ideas thought up by our parents, and we vanish before or after them." Other children in the neighborhood begin to run away as well. Soon enough the children finally come home. None are sick, injured, hungry, sleepy, and none of them talk about their experiences when they were gone. It's almost as if the children never went anywhere. The parents just didn't think of them in those moments, and to them, they vanished.

    Next the story "The Nice Little People" actually turned out to be very humorous after a morbid ending. Lowell Swift is dating a women named Madeline,and on their anniversary he is walking home with flowers and we picked up with looks to be like a plastic knife. Nothing thinking much of it he sticks it in his pocket and goes to wait for his girlfriend. Setting the knife on the couch a little plastic piece pops off and mini humans crawl out. Hoping not to frighten his girlfriend when she returns he tells them to get back inside. Looking out the window he sees Madeline's return but she kisses her boss goodbye who was dropping her off. Coming upstairs she tells Lowell that she is leaving him. Lowell then says it's fine and ask for a goodbye kiss, she refuses, a goodbye hug, she refuses, and then he stabs her in the heart because the little spaceship in his pocket just grew hot and forced him too. Was this story fiction or was the story real but Lowell put in the little people and spaceship as a cover up.

   Both of these stories make you think something different at the last sentence that you may had not been thinking at the first paragraph or two. I enjoyed both of these reading however I think I enjoyed "The Nice Little People" a bit better just because the ending was so abrupt and uncalled for.