"After I Was Thrown in the River, and Before I Drowned" by David Eggers

Hello again everyone.

I'll start out by saying that I thought the story was OK. I didn't like it as much as Ha Jin's, which is my favorite story so far, but I did like some things about it.

I thought the story was humorous, realistic and descriptive when necessary. One line I read that made me laugh a little was "You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by you and you say, Damn! That's a fast dog! Well that's me." I though it was funny because even if you've never seen a dog run really fast you can still imagine one running like a maniac. And I could definitely imagine myself saying something like that if I saw a dog running really fast. I'm not sure if anyone else thought that line was funny but I thought it was.

The portrayal of Steven, the dog, sounds realistic because he mentions how he loves running and jumping and he describes how he likes digging his claws into the ground. And he mentions how manages to jump between the gap near the creek that is around twelve feet wide. And he sounds like a very energetic dog so I'm not surprised that he could run or jump like that.

Eggers mentions things like the type of dog Steven was racing, like Edward, the bull terrier that I think is worth mentioning. Because you can look the dog up and see a picture of the dog and see if it's personality matched with the dog in the story. I think Edward being a bull terrier made sense because he was trying to bite and bump into Steven while they were racing, so he was trying to cheat, and when you look at a picture of a bull terrier it kind of looks like a dog that would do that. Unlike Susan the retriever, which looks like a friendlier type of dog and is described that way in the story.

I did like the fact that he made the character seem realistic but at the same time hearing Steven he loved to run so much was a tad annoying because I got that he loved it early on with the howling noises and funny sentences. So the repetitiveness is realistic but also slightly annoying.

To the person who wrote the response before me asking what the story was really about, I wasn't to sure what it was about ether. Eggers did mention something about some of the dogs jumping and the other dogs watching and judging. So in that case I guess he's talking about people judging you throughout your life and some people trying to put you down, kind of like the squirrels in the story. But I'm not sure maybe someone else understood it and they'll explain it to us better.

I'll end by asking if anyone else thought the story was humorous to some degree and what part was funny to you.