Critical Response #2

The Kugelmass Episode

I really enjoyed The Kuglemass Episode. It was a really captivating story that broke the mold of most short fiction. I liked how Allen took something so out of the ordinary, like traveling between novels, and made it sound so everyday and average.

Allen’s story introduced what kind of character Kugelmass is. We learn within the first page that he is bored with his love life and wants to have an affair, but he doesn’t want his wife to find out because he’s afraid she’ll divorce him and he doesn’t want to go through that again. There is definitely a lot of foreshadowing here because we know that something bad is going to happen to this man because no one can have their cake and eat it too.

Allen does a really great job of making this situation sound like everyday life, like this could actually happen. I think it really helped that I read Madame Bovary because I could understand what was going on in the novel and it almost gave me a clearly and more comical sense of what these characters were like. I saw a side to Madame Bovary that I had never seen in her novel and it was interesting to see someone else’s point of view.

After reading this short story, it really inspired me to come up with a really creative idea because I realized that I doesn’t take much to make something so obscure and make it sound like everyday life, like it could really happen anytime.

The end was a really good twist to the rest of the story because he finally got what he deserved. After being such a shady and selfish character the entire story, he was forced to run away from the verb Tener, “to have” which is really ironic because he wanted to have it all but couldn’t.