Short Story Essay 3

yet in both situations he and his abilities become so desired that the people don’t realize
that they are destroying the very thing they cherish most. Everett’s use of parallelism and
metaphor helps us decipher the characters’ purposes in the story, and comprehend the
theme of individual place in the universe.
In these short stories, we observe how JD Salinger, E. Annie Proulx, and Percival
Everett explore themes of individual place and the search for ways to deal with life by
using similes, allegories, metaphors, diction, and parallelism. The authors succeed in
making a modern statement about human nature. Certain aspects of human nature
indicated are paradoxical behaviors, greed, and an ambiguous perspective towards life. I
would most definitely recommend these short stories to a selected few who I know would
be as interested as I am in comparing and contrasting our thoughts on the subjects. I
found the exploration of these short stories from the Modern/Post-modern Era to be
rather enjoyable and very insightful.