el blog post numero 2- michael hernandez

So i logged on Saturday night and, in my sleepiness, misread the due date. Now I'm late, and sick, and headache plauged, and determined to make a good post. bear with me.

1)   I appreciated the way that Chekhov chose to present this story. I feel that any well developed story/characters are spoiled the moment the author directly moralizes a story. Doing this ruins any thinking that a reader has done for himself. Of course, sometimes the moral is completely obvious and is stated seemingly just to make it crystal clear for children or idiots, but in other cases where the moral may not be completely clear, its always best to leave it out.  Stating a stories moral is akin to adding a description to a Rorschach image  telling you what you're supposed to see.I believe that lessons stick to a person best when they are realized rather then revealed even though the same message is gained.

Checkhov's story is a great example of a story that does it right. I could be told that having an affair is bad, but in my mind, the only image i see is a big fat " disloyalty=bad". In this story, the end is left open, and i am left to imaging what might happen. i could picture things working out for a time, but then id begin to wonder: the husband is well off-hell have the means to find her. surely people will recognize either Gurov or Anna, and see what they're doing. do not all people who run away from a problem eventually get caught by it?  in the end, you can easily imagine what would happen to them, and the process of inferring leaves the lesson well planted in your mind, whatever it may be.

3) Whats great about Chekhov's story is that in order to involve the audience more, he reveals a lot about Gurov's point of view while remaining unbiased and untied to a moral. Because of this, we get insight to motivations  and can put ourselves in his place without knowing if hes right or wrong. The reasons for doing this are most likely tied to the simple fact that Chekhov wrote a story that most would give a moral. Rather than having the audience look at Gurov and thinking " OK, these emotions and thoughts and motivations are wrong because hes a bad guy" Chekhov uses this point of view to stabilize the plot and involve readers.

did any of this post make sense? its short and written by someone half-dead...