Short Stories

SHORT STORIES

By Mark A Torr
ELAA30
      Our experiences make everyone who they are by the way they affect and change our personalities. The environment is another factor that makes people how they are because people get used to the environment we are in and learn how to survive in different environments. The three short stories that will talked about are Sunflowers by Lois Simmie which takes place during the Great Depression in Saskatoon and the story happens on a farm, Moose and the Sparrow by Hugh Garner which takes place during the 1950’s in a camp on Vancouver Island and Gravity by Susan Butala which takes place on a farm during modern day. The characters in these three short stories all faced isolation and were treated abusively by the people around them.

      In the short story Sunflowers, the protagonist retells her story of her past life about the Great Depression to a class as an assignment and it is about a woman living on a farm with a son and an abusive husband who used to beat on her so bad that she had to go to the hospital for operation and also, she had to show no affection to anything she loved or her husband would destroy it for example, she loved her son so much but whenever her husband was around, she didn’t show any love and this used to confuse the son. She learnt this when her husband destroyed the sunflowers that she loved and it showed that there wasn’t any hope for her so she eventually runs away. She tried to ask the priest for help but he said that she should forgive her husband, this shows that people didn’t really care about women during this time and that women didn’t have any rights. So she was all alone because no one would help her and this shaped her to be independent and the irony comes in when she comes back to the farm and the husband is down with a stroke and is helpless so she had the power over him and used to torture him but not as bad as he tortured her which shows they were two different people and it also...