Anniversary

In the short story Anniversary, Jon Hassler presents a man with the stereotypical need for control, but the story reveals the control he is fighting for is within himself.  

The narrator thrives on his control through using red ink:  "Red puts everything else in the background" (37, Hessler).  He used red ink to put his words, opinions, and thoughts above and in front of all others.  In a way it’s overbearing, but it is what he needs to feel as if he is in control.  He uses the power of the red ink to mask his feelings of aimlessness caused by the conflict within him.  The inner conflict, indirectly stated, is how he is dealing with stages of dementia.  This conflict prevents him from being able to remember much of anything anymore.  “Angeline’s? Who is Angeline?” (Hassler, 38).  This quote shows the narrator’s confusion and lack of memory because we later come to know that Angeline is his daughter-in-law.  What the reader infers through reading the letter that Angeline wrote to the narrator was that they were close and connected.  This is shown when her letter starts with “Dear Dad” (Hassler, 40).  By saying “Dad”, the reader can see the daughterly love and connection these two have.  The connection is weakened, if not nonexistent altogether because the narrator isn't in control of his own memories and doesn't even know who she is.  His character vs self conflict is different because he doesn't know he is dealing with it. But the reader picks up on it and it plays on our emotions because he can't remember certain important people in his life.  He desperately needs to reread letters and papers and mark them up with his red ink to maintain his authority over what he can still control. The narrator encompasses the  male stereotypical desire to be in control and through this character vs self conflict you see how far and what means he goes to maintain that sense of control.

To revise this paper I restated my thesis to make it clearer and I set it up more to talk about the rest of my paper.  I shortened my first quote to only say the most important part.  I realized by peer reviewing other people's papers, I had understood the story differently.  Instead of understanding it as the time was passing him by, I took it more literal and thought he had dementia.  So in my revision I really went into more detail and found examples to why I thought dementia was occurring. I really emphasized that aspect of the paper and tied the lens back in at the end better.  I chose this paper because it was the one that I put the most revision into to try to make my outlook on the story more understandable.