Fiction Packet Response (The longer stories)

I thought that the intern was incredibly ironic, and the manner in which the elements of irony are discovered makes the conclusion of the short story all the more impactful and shocking. The intern comes across as a very sane and intelligence scholar. These scholarly characteristics come across in the way that the short story is written and through the voice of the scholar. The entire short story is divided by headings relating to the content of each individual passage. It is very easy to understand, organized, every detail is written down, and is in a logical progression. The narrator himself speaks, mostly, coherently and with a sophisticated vocabulary representative of his initially supposed education within psychology.

However, this presentation of the narrator collapses on itself as the ends of the short story comes near. The narrator becomes paranoid if whether he is actually being observed as well and that he is an experiment conducted by either Doctor Rauch or Kagen. He evaluates himself that he is physically and mentally sound, although it is clear at the end that his psyche is far from a state of complete sanity: he is disheveled, surviving on a strict diet of chowder, hasn’t left his room for an extended period of time, and is severely lacking sleep. It becomes clear that there was no experiment. He was observing himself and that this delusion he is in is a form of self-induced therapy. This makes sense why Rauch’s and Kagen’s brother had no physical description given, as they were actually the Intern. The intern begins to lose himself as story comes to a close. His sentences become fragmented as he runs out of paper which is necessary for his self-induced therapy to be conducted. The realization is not made towards the end until all of the evidence builds up which eventually leads one to assume that the Intern is really a schizophrenic or has some sort of psychological disorder. This realization comes with a strong sense of irony, as he is initially made out to be a practicing psychology student observing individuals with psychological disorders, but it is he himself who is suffering from said disorders.

The most interesting part of the second short story “Point and Line” was the analogy made about the girl undergoing therapy sessions and Schrödinger’s cat.  Both the cat and the girl are described as being stuck in a box: the cat is in the airtight chamber and the girl in the therapist’s office. At the end of the therapy session results will be made by the therapist; it is mentioned that results will arise from the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. Also, both the girl and Schrodinger’s cat seem to have two possible states of existence. The girl refers to herself in third person as the “girl”, so there is the actually narrator and the inner dialogue of the girl. The cat can be considered dead or alive. The analogy finally made sense to me when I truly processed the outer dialogue that breaks the margins of the text, consisting of the actually conversation between the narrator and the therapist. The actual dialogue has very little substance, not much at all is actually said between the two, whereas the rest of the text, within the margins, is very thorough and detailed. You could say that this dialogue is “alive” and the conversation between the therapist and the narrator in reality is “dead”, just like Schrodinger’s cat, which can be dead and alive at the same time.