Due: Friday March 22
Create/Design a vanity license plate (a personalized license plate) for your protagonist. What would your protagonist's vanity plate say? Why? Use quotes and suport from your independent novels to help answer this question. Don't forget to check your work with your rubrics.
Patrick D’Andrea
ReplyDeleteQ4, Reading Response #2
March 22, 2013
Create a vanity license plate for your protagonist. What would the license plate say? Why? Use quotes to support your answer. (Inferring about characters).
I just finished reading the short story, “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” by Russell Banks. The protagonist, Ron, tells the story of an unusual love affair using two alternating points of view, first person and third person. When he narrates as an outside observer, he excessively compliments his own attractiveness suggesting that “Ron is effortlessly attractive, a genetic wonder, tall, slender, symmetrical, and clean.” Since Ron alternates between these two points of view, sometimes even explicitly saying “I’m still the man in this story,” I believe that Ron must be beyond pretentious. I think Ron would own a vanity license plate that says, TOOCOOL.
Ron is an intriguing character because despite what he claims about his charm he ends up having a fairly long-lived affair with a women who is so hideous that he says, “ . . . to himself that he is speaking to the most unattractive woman he has ever seen” when he glances at Sarah Cole. I think that Ron believes that his attractiveness constricts him, so he decides to abandon societal expectations, at least temporarily, and becomes “fascinated” by this repulsive lady. Ron is too cool for what society expects from him. He doesn’t seem bothered by the “grinning” people in the bar when he leaves with Sarah Cole.
Reading this short story made me think about how attractiveness often prevents people from meeting people just because they are afraid of what people might say about them for hanging around a “homelier” person than themselves. I hope that I don’t unintentionally prevent people from meeting me simply because of their or my own looks. From now on, I will try to be more aware of attraction and how it dictates some human behaviors.