Answers From The Wind

I will be reading a twenty-five minute excerpt from my short story titled “Answers From The Wind”. This story was written in ENG-387 - Fiction Writing II. It follows a curious town where life for its citizens is harmonized and planned, and because of this there are no questions about the path that one takes in the course of a lifetime. Serahfina, a citizen that internally feels distant from this mindset, finds herself questioning and eventually challenging this perspective. This work is concerned with how sense of place is directly connected to an individual\u27s expectations of life and being. For example in our society, there is an aim for individuals to reach an accomplishment of some type of productivity in the course of a lifetime. My inquiry lies not in what paths we take in order to attain a goal; rather I would like to ask, “why do paths exist?”. What is the relationship between purpose and plan? And how much pull does society have in defining this relationship? Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found through creation of fictive worlds that differ in social codes. This story presents the idea that perhaps socially programmed paths prevent profound metaphysical pondering. The citizens in the story don’t find purpose and path to be separate, but rather find that planned paths are the purpose. The story connects its conceptual idea with its craft decisions. I establish the town by using consistent interior rules. The sense of place, how the reader understands where the characters are, is a central element of the story. I highlight this by repetitively describing the morning—to—night lifestyle of the citizens. A major text I interacted with was “East Of Eden” by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck spends a duration of time describing the landscape and lifestyle in Salinas, California. In doing so, he creates a stable sense of place that the reader can rely on. This inspired my decision in extensively building the character of the town. Serahfina’s divergent psychological landscape is then juxtaposed with the stagnant sense of place; Since the citizens cannot relate to her existential questions, Serahfina is curious in solitude. I use the narrative to create the following rhetoric argument: questions and answers about life are influenced by the predetermined purpose defined by people