Misery Reaction Paper

Reaction Paper

Lourdes Lopez

ENG/125

07/14/2014

Denise Eatherly

The story’s name is Misery written by Anton Chekhov. The story is about a man name Iona Potapov the sledge driver and his mare. Iona just lost his son due to an illness and is deeply sad for his loss. Iona wants to talk to someone about it to let his emotions out; his first fare was an officer. He was taking him to Vyborgskaya as he tries to express his agony the officer shuts him down for his reckless driving. His second fare is three men that were picking on him on the way, he still ignore them and mention that his son had just pass away to his surprise the three men didn’t care one of them even said “we shall all die”. Wanting to talk to someone but no one will hear thousands of people walking but yet no one to talk to Iona felt miserable. He finally found a man as he was expressing his feelings about his son; he then realizes the man is asleep. Iona with no one to talk to about his son’s dead starts talking to his mare as the mare just stares at him he realizes that he had someone to talk to all along his mare.

The author gives a great introduction that puts you in the mood of the story describing the weather, being detail about the background and so on. His ideas of the story grab my attention as he was describing Iona and his horse. I believe the author’s strategy was to capture the reader’s attention by giving as much detail as he could to describe the person or what he was doing. He constantly describes what Iona is doing as he drives his sledge recklessly and how the officer tells him to drive right. The idea was to identify Iona early in the story that something was troubling him. As the story goes on he introduces what’s wrong with Iona letting the reader know that his son has just passed away. His ideas give good points in identifying the theme of the story.

The story made me realize that people are cruel sometimes and don’t always want to listen to someone else’s problems....