Sunday, May 15, 2011

Contents of a Young Man's Pocket

Although I frequently read essays from my essay collection, I occasionally find ones that I don't even remember adding. This essay is one of those gems. Starting out, it seems to be just an essay about the short story, "Contents of a Dead Man's Pocket," with a really bad introduction. However, once the author tells us of the contents of said pocket, it is clear (at least to those who have read the short story) that it is not. The essay is actually about a man named James, who from what I can tell is a Mary Sue of the author. Perhaps an astute reader could guess that James was a "memory type man" from the contents of his pockets: a camera, a pencil and eraser case, and an ipod, but not me. He carried the camera because his personal motto was "No proof no truth", and I can only assume that he pronounces it "troof".

Then, around the second page, there is a massive shift from third person to first person, where we learn that James was the author all along (!). Honestly, I was completely surprised by this revelation, considering that I really had no god-damn idea what the hell this essay was even talking about until the end.

Long story short, this is a great essay. Next time I pull out my binders for a little bit of story-time, this essay is going to be read aloud. I hope that everybody enjoys this as much as I did.

Side-note: I'm using my parents' printer, so the scans look a little different. I don't know how to stop it from scanning the whole screen, even if there's not paper there. I suppose I could spend time and photoshop that part out, but most everybody that knows me knows I am too lazy to do such a thing, so you're just going to have to deal with it.



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