Write your response to this short story by Margaret Atwood. What features of the story or choices do you find most notable? Which details stick out to you the most? What do you think the story is trying to say? 

This short story literally became my new reading, it tops Mother Tongue, it takes the cake.

There is so much repetition of words, “very,” “ruins,” “howling,” “howl,”  the emphasis on “you” it sort of makes you focus on it and imagine the scene. As well as the level of details, its very descriptive, using imagery to allow the audience to see the story unfold in their head. In the beginning it allows you to imagine  wilderness with this cleared area surround by tree, rocks surrounding you and broken items, almost like the land is being treated like a junk yard. The second page made me imagine the people howling actings as wolves, and sometimes they become wolves in my head, just lurking around the trees, watching the tent. There is also a use of pathos here, the word howling is being used with like a negative connotation, that something is a threaten, especially calling the people howling “howlers”, and at the end they are described as ” the eyes of the howlers, red and shining…” This image itself paints the people as villains, normally in children’s stories the villains are describes with red eyes, associating it with evil. And the term “howler” sounds liek a wolf, and wolfs are associated with beast, like the wolf in little red riding hoodie. The focus how the tent is made of paper stuck out to me as well as “you want to gather them inside your tent, for protection,” it felt like a perspective of a mother, knowing the dangers of the outside world and trying to protect her love who’s who are curious. There was this truth about telling the truth. The line, “Some of the writing has to describe the howling.. it must be the truth about the howling, but this is difficult to do because you can’t see through the paper walls…. you don’t want to go out there… because not all of them can hear the howling in the same way you do.” These pieces of phrases through the story helped me piece together what is happening. The mother if scared of the outside world base on what she thinks she knows and hears, but her kids are hearing something completely different, they aren’t hearing the dangers and the threats. The mother is living in her own paranoia and feeding into her fear, holding her kids back from going out into the world.  She ‘s making up stories and basically writing out their lives for them. As she’s making up stories about their lives and how they are living, she makes up stories of the outside world of how she used to know  and love it before the dangers she encountered. At the end, I’m not to sure how to interpret it but the mother and the family are out and exposed to the world, and the mother seems to keep making up stories in attempts to protect her loved ones. 

I really appreciate the details and description in this story because their are sections that has a direct meaning while creating this fantasy like imagery in my head. 

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