I have a love-hate relationship with Fugue by Laura Hendrix Ezell. My attention was captured right from the first page with Paulette’s games, and how literal the “terrible, relentless as dogs” her dreams was. Fugue was so well written but the story left me with so many unresolved questions in my head that I could not let it go. Ezell did a wonderful job with creating suspensions for the story after painted an exposition filled with fear: two times the protagonist woke up with no memory of what had happened and where she was.
I personally attracted and prone to stories with people who suffered from some kind of mental illness, maybe because I saw so many common between it and I. The title gave a hint of what could be happening to this woman’s mind. Sleepwalking, loneliness from separation from real …show more content…
Paulette’s condition was something she feared to the extent that she avoided sleeping to a devastating state. The ending seemed to come with an unexpected turn of joy for the protagonist, but I still sense uneasiness over the situation. Could Paulette really be Bettye? What would happen to these two people when they regretted the decision they made that night and fallen right back to the same state.
Third person point of view seemed to be a strength of Laura Ezell, since this story (third person omniscient to be specific) and seven other of her stories in a collection of just eleven were written from this viewpoint.
The hereby at the start of the short story worked as a perfect description of Fugue (a huge plus for A Record of Our Debts’ uniqueness). I did not understand it one bit before actually diving into the story itself. But the hereby did not help with the uneasy feeling after reading the story, it only confirmed the restlessness need to fill up unresolved
I personally attracted and prone to stories with people who suffered from some kind of mental illness, maybe because I saw so many common between it and I. The title gave a hint of what could be happening to this woman’s mind. Sleepwalking, loneliness from separation from real …show more content…
Paulette’s condition was something she feared to the extent that she avoided sleeping to a devastating state. The ending seemed to come with an unexpected turn of joy for the protagonist, but I still sense uneasiness over the situation. Could Paulette really be Bettye? What would happen to these two people when they regretted the decision they made that night and fallen right back to the same state.
Third person point of view seemed to be a strength of Laura Ezell, since this story (third person omniscient to be specific) and seven other of her stories in a collection of just eleven were written from this viewpoint.
The hereby at the start of the short story worked as a perfect description of Fugue (a huge plus for A Record of Our Debts’ uniqueness). I did not understand it one bit before actually diving into the story itself. But the hereby did not help with the uneasy feeling after reading the story, it only confirmed the restlessness need to fill up unresolved