Final Reflection

This ended up being a fascinating project. It was interesting to see how my understanding of "The Man in the Well" manifested throughout the quarter and throughout the several readings of the story I did.

I began with a rather mundane response to the story that touched briefly on things I thought were symbols or things I had questions about. As I did the various experiments my understanding of the story grew. Through the Lohafer experiment I realized that there were many places I felt like the story could end. One of the sentences I chose occured at the very beginning. It would have been a very short story, but would have left us asking the same questions of why the children did not help the man. It was most interesting though that I chose a sentence right before the actual ending because it felt like the part that gave me most closure. This was the same way I felt about the "Aunt Lympy" preclosure experiment. It is interesting to see that my result was not swayed by having done the experiment before.

Before I did the section on May I thought it was going to be really difficult because Sher was not featured in May's book, which did not give me an easy answer to what his story would be classified as. As I reread the definitions May gives to describe Realism and Romanticism I found that it was actually quite easy and interesting to place the story in relation to May's theories. The Morano experiment was by far the hardest part of the project because I felt like I did not have much to say on the subject, but in short Sher could have been writing a "creative nonfiction essay", but we know he was not because he has said as much.

My favorite part of the project was the discussion I had via the blog with my husband James. He too is a student at UC and has taken literature classes before, but none this year. I enjoyed reading his very colorful reaction to this story. It was probably one of the most real and in your face reactions I think I have ever encountered a student giving. That was the benefit of having used my husband in this project. Knowing that we have different tastes is literature and different ways of responding ensured me that using him as my guinea pig for this project would give me some very good material to work with.

On the whole the process of rereading a short story throughout the quarter and analyzing it in different ways was really beneficial to me as a reader. Being a history major I am used to having to analyze writing, but works of fiction are way different from historical text. This project and this class in general helped awaken my ability to analyze the fictional part of writing and broadened my abilities as a reader. Again, it was extremely beneficial.