Jessica's Response to "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night"

If I knew what I know now about the phrase “it was a dark and stormy night”, I would have never chosen this reading to write a response to! The phrase is known to represent a style of writing that Wikipedia says is “characterized by a self-serious attempt at dramatic flair, the imitation of formulaic styles, an extravagantly florid style, redundancies, confusing syntax, and sentences…that are exceedingly lengthy.” Sound fun to read and analyze? Didn’t think so. The first time I read it, I couldn’t get through the whole thing. I glazed over the words, skimming the document and just getting frustrated at the repetitive sentences. I’ve never read anything like this and so I initially thought it was a story, within a story, within a story, within a story etc. You get the picture. I decided to revisit the paper. I’m still not exactly sure what the message is here. So I will just tell you what I got out of it and am interested in what everyone else thinks of this reading.

The theme seems to be something of defining what the beginning, middle, and end are and their purposes. It starts out saying that Brigham Young and Brigham Old sat around a campfire and this is the story old told: Brigham Young and Brigham Old sat around the campfire and this is story he told: Brigham Young and Pierre Menard….etc. Then it goes on to talk about an old lady and a typewriter and smashed tomato. And the rain through the window writes a story about a man telling a story about an aunt telling a story about the beginning. Then the story starts talking about a hoop snake that must travel by taking its tail in its mouth and rolling along. This is bad though because sometimes some hoop snakes are venomous so when they bite their own tail in order to progress, they die of snakebite. Maybe this is saying that we are all just stuck in the middle, poisoned by our own desire to make progress. She then relates a story that is all ‘middle’. Then the aspect of leaving your mark on the world and leaving your story is discussed. The most interesting line I think was “we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning, living as we do, in the middle.” Life is all one continuous round and the only way will survive is by making the end and the beginning meet. As you can tell, I’m really not sure what to think of this reading.