Short Story Techniques

The short story, “Emergency” Denis Johnson uses two distinctive techniques to lay out the story for his readers. Johnson creates a narrator who is a drug user and works in a hospital, which makes him an attention grabbing character. The other character, Georgie, is just as interesting and also a pill-popping drug user. These characters are so random with what they see, say, and do, that it is baffling as a reader. Without diving deeper into the text, this story is just insane. Johnson uses what I would call abstract imagery, unknowing what’s real and what’s not. For example, the character Georgie is not hurt or disgusted by the terrible circumstances of the rabbit he accidentally ran over. Instead, he finds an enormous desire to care for the baby bunnies that the rabbit was impregnated with. Everything seems like a hallucination, but has an underlying truth of how life works.

In “The Things They Carried,” the story seems to be more genuine because of the dialogue. Grammar is not taken into consideration with casual cursing and broken English. Tim O’ Brien breaks into his characters minds with what they desire and fantasizes about, like how Jimmy Cross feels for Martha. As a reader I was able to easily tap into how the soldiers felt, like the guilt and pain they had after the death of Kiowa. Tim O’Brien writes with a descriptive flow. His written language is a strong technique. He also keeps a repetitive theme. He brings up the "things carried" (which some could be forms of symbolism) and then listing the weight of those things more then once.