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A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius​ by Dave Eggers: Preface

This preface is about twenty pages long, and, throughout it, Eggers displays more

humor and voice than I have ever seen in a book intro. He provides suggestions for how to

properly enjoy his book, in which he tells readers that they will probably want to skip the

whole thing. He goes off on almost random tangents, describing the people and events in

his life that did and did not make it into his novel. He gives a list of symbols and metaphors

that he created, effectively killing the need for English students to figure them out

themselves. He adds random details, such as a drawing of a stapler and his place on the

sexual orientation scale (3).

In doing so, Eggers is able to fully incorporate his spirit into the story before he’s

even begun the tale. Right off the bat, the audience can see who he is as a person, and they

can connect to him through his wit and good sense of humor. This draws the audience into

his book afterwards: Because they’re able to glean so much of his personality beforehand,

they can enter his story with an already powerful sense of who he is and a tremendous

amount of trust in his intellect. On top of this, they may continue reading his novel due

because this preface made them laugh, and they wish to move forward and laugh more.

The voice that Eggers provides here also reveals his desires to write largely for

himself. Even though this long preface isn’t entirely necessary, he includes it anyway

because he has fun creating it, portraying how he was captivated by his humorous writing

just as much as the audience, if not more so. This displays a fantastic amount of confidence

on Eggers’s behalf as well: He clearly does not care if the reader thinks that he’s being

ridiculous, and the reader picks up on this and trusts him as a writer even more so because

of this confidence.
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“Ava Wrestles the Alligator” by Karen Russell

In this short story, Russell combines a lot of different elements to create a tale that

directly reveals almost nothing to its readers, and yet the audience is able to follow through

different context clues and unsettling details. She describes the before and after of Ava’s

experience with “The Bird Man” without telling us what actually happened, but the

audience still feels greatly disturbed by Ava’s telling her mother through the Ouija board

that she “did a pretty bad thing,” which is made even more discomforting through Ava’s

inability to spell the word “disappointed” (emphasizes how young she is) and her decision

to punish herself through her mother’s ghost. Although the reader is never told about

what’s really going on with Ossie’s “boyfriends,” they are unnerved by her possessions and

feel horrified when they see her letter, describing (with no capitalization and frequently

incorrect spelling) how she has run off into the swampy wilderness with a man who

doesn’t appear to exist.

These portray Russell’s incredible ability to use contrasting and misty details in

order to make the audience feel a certain way. When she leaves out the specifics of events

(like the “Bird Man” experience), it’s left entirely up to the human imagination to decide

what has happened. This creates even more anxiety for the reader, as their brain is freed to

travel upon the worst routes possible to fill in that gap in the story. And each contrast

between the childish innocence of the sisters and the sinister place they’ve found

themselves in emphasizes the wrongness of the protagonists’ being here, heightening the

audience’s unease.

Through doing so, Russell is able to twist the reader’s emotions and make them feel

the exact nervousness that she wants to create.

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“St. Chola” by Kvashy-Boyle

This piece is designed to take the reader and place them directly into the events of

the story. Unlike the vast majority of fiction, it is written in the second person and reads

like Boyle is telling you about your own life. Because of this, the readers are almost unable

to separate themselves from the protagonist, and even the most prejudiced are forced to

connect to Shala and recognize her and her family members as people. To further develop

this, Boyle also chooses to begin the story with very relatable scenarios and issues of

pre-pubescent childhood, drawing the audience in by prompting them to remember

themselves in their youth, then pushing them to picture how they would be affected if they

were put in Shala’s shoes at her young age.

“St. Chola” is conveyed through long paragraphs of very short, very plain sentences

or fragments of sentences, almost as if it details a simple list of events. Ultimately, this

highlights the overwhelming nature of Shala’s young life: Everything happens incredibly

fast and incredibly close together, as if Shala doesn’t have any time to recover or brace

herself before she must face the next challenge. The reader is, in turn, able to pick up on

this panicky sort of stress without even receiving a direct explanation for it, allowing them

to understand where Shala’s emotions are and to continue on through the story without

being slowed down.

Boyle never forces too much info or descriptions into her story in order to relate to

the reader or convey Shala’s mental state. Instead, she is able to rely entirely on the second

person and cropped sentence structure to make her connection to the audience and allow

them to truly immerse themselves in the protagonist’s story.

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“The Question of Where We Begin” by Kyle Minor

Minor begins his story at the very end of the events surrounding his uncle’s death,

as he describes the suicide in the second sentence and simply lists what came afterwards in

the brief paragraph following it. As a result, the audience is immediately shocked and made

curious as to what came before this tragedy, and they are compelled to read onward in

search of answers.

To push this response further, Minor follows his intro by slowly working his way

backwards in his uncle’s story, inviting the reader to continue and potentially gain the

information and satisfaction that the opening couldn’t quite provide. From there, he builds

further on everything that could have been changed to stop the suicide, listing scenarios

from the uncle’s wife not leaving him to the Big Bang not happening until the reader is left

feeling overwhelmed and helpless in the face of what Minor perceives as potential causes,

effectively portraying how Minor/the narrator must feel in regards to the death and his

inability to stop it.

Minor is also able to convey this helplessness through his use of rhetorical

questions. The story begins and ends with a rhetorical question, and they make up the

majority of the piece as a whole. Because they appear so frequently and never receive an

answer, the audience can actually see the desperation of the narrator in his futile attempts

to understand how his world operates, as well as his intense hopelessness as he receives no

answers in return.
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“A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease” by Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer chooses to write his short story with the formatting of an instructional

punctuation guide. He describes his different, nonexistent punctuation marks in great

detail, and he lists examples of dialogue in which they are used as if he’s creating a

dictionary. However, interspersed in his explanations and portrayed in his dialogue are the

unfortunate facts of his life outside of the informative guide that he’s designing, and, the

more he continues with his “textbook” style piece, the more he reveals his pain,

desperation, and loneliness.

The reader is pulled into the story by the creative way that it’s portrayed. They see

the strange symbols detailed in the writing and are immediately curious as to what they

could mean. Through this, they can be both depressed and intrigued by the narrator’s sad

tale, and the complexity of his family life is uncovered as they continue onward in the piece.

The audience sees the love and sorrow of these people in Foer’s life, and yet Foer doesn’t

even use words to express all of it.

By the very end of the story, he quits using written words almost altogether, and the

conversation between him and his father occurs with these silent punctuation marks in the

place of real dialogue. The reader is left to dig their own sort of understanding out of this

through the symbols that Foer provided earlier, and, in doing so, Foer portrays the

muddiness and unclear communication between his family members. He has to analyze

everything left unsaid in his conversations and create his own interpretation, just as the

reader does with the last dialogue exchange- and, even so, Foer notes that his family

members must all have their own interpretations, and, therefore, there can’t be any clear

understanding.