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1. Decide which character among “Everyday Use", "Story of an Hour", and "Two Kinds" you are most interested in. To which character do you most relate? Which character do you most relate? Which character is the most unique? What makes you interested in this character? - Due Friday

"Story Of An Hour" was intriguing and left the reasons for the character’s reaction to her husband’s death to unconventional reasons [for an unconventional reaction], but was short. “Everyday Use” use to bore me to death the first and second times I read it, but the third more recent time I more fully understood the story. However, it remains nothing too special, as the only thing I find really interesting in that story was the way Dee was portrayed (by the story’s perspective being the mother’s), and how she was portrayed was biased.

“Two Kinds” ended up being the one I was most interested in, also because it was a story I could more relate to. I could relate to Amy Tan in the story because of my brief period of rebellion against my parents reminded me of how she refused to become talented at the piano. The setting was much more relatable compared to that of the other stories: “Everyday Use” being a clash of urban and rural and set in the rural, and “Story of An Hour” being in the city but back in time around late 1800’s to early 1900’s. It is 2005 and I’ve lived in the suburbs my entire life.

I think Amy ends up being the most unique since she ends up sitting down and actually trying to learn something on the piano; as a procrastinator and a perfectionist, I completely identify and sympathize with her. She ends up proving herself wrong in a major way, how her Mother said she could play well if she just tried. I also related to her since she expected that her mother expected her to become this all feared prodigy at the piano, and ended up making it harder on herself. How Amy at the end picks up the piano piece and ends up playing fairly well, and the ending hinting that maybe she was thinking how wrong she was all those years; that is what I found most interesting.

Whereas the other stories would either abruptly end (The sudden death of the main character in “Story of An Hour”), and “Everyday Use” was told essentially by the mother’s perspective and was biased, “Two Kinds” managed to provide me a perspective of Amy without a bias that forever covers the story. The ending, I think, helps peel back the bias, when Amy herself realizes she may have been wrong (and since it is Amy herself, and we are reading via her perspective, we respond accordingly, if we haven’t already, as observable readers). I found this most interesting, as I found it reflected the tendency for humans to be biased in their perspective (The ego), and to see the ego of a character (especially the one we perceive the story through) to be checked by a realization that it may have been wrong, felt more real than either of the two other stories.