Sign for My Father, Who Stressed the Bunt

This poem is about a boy growing up and always focusing on the fun and glorious parts of baseball, while his dad is trying to teach him a lesson. Bunting in baseball is often done as a sacrifice to advance other players on your team into a better position. For the boy's whole life, his father stuck to this one aspect of the game, bunting. The boy never took him seriously and always put most of his emphasis on home runs and the exciting parts of the game, but he always obeyed his father. In the last stanza of the poem, the boy is mature enough to realized what his father was doing and why it was so important, as he was, "getting a grip on the sacrifice." I believe the sacrifice that the boy was understanding was the one that his father was making for him as he dedicated time to help his son learn important things, as well as the sacrifice for his team that he would make by bunting.

Miss Forbes' Murder Mystery

There are so many aspects of Miss Forbes' Summer of Happiness to analyze, that I feel like her murder mystery is often overlooked. This is probably because there are not many hints as to who killed her at first glance, but out of context there are clues that lead me to think that the murderer of Miss Forbes is the boys scuba instructor and Miss Forbes' love interest, Oreste.
With the introduction of Oreste to the story, the author Marquez puts emphasis on the fact that Oreste always carries knives around his belt and insists on using hand to hand combat when he hunts. This is the first clue, as Miss Forbes cause of death was multiple stab wounds. Later in the story, Miss Forbes expresses her feelings for Oreste, as she finds him attractive, this established an emotional connection between them that seems strange and abrupt, similar to how it would be if Oreste was in fact the murderer.
There is an ancient Greek play called "Orestes", in which a character in the play named Orestes kills his mother. Oreste is connected to ancient Greece in another way when he is described as looking like a sea animal. Although Miss Forbes isn't Orestes' mother, she is an older dictatorial person in Oreste's life, similar to his mother in the play.
It seems like there are too many fingers pointing at Oreste for him to not be the murderer of Miss Forbes. This aspect of the story usually is neglected, while most focus on the personality of Miss Forbes, but I believe this murder mystery has enough to be deeply analyzed.

Mersault's Alternate Fate

Eric Steigelfest

              When Mersault, the main character in "The Sranger", realizes what his death sentence means, he shows a bit of emotion. This emotion, however, is not about any people or activities, it's rather about becoming free from his cell again. For me, Mersault's actions and feelings were not enough to convince me that he isn't a psychopath, as all of his behavior leads me to believe. I believe that the author could've taken an alternate route for the ending of the story, revealing that Mersault truly does have feelings and legitimately does care. An alternate ending to "The Stranger" could've been a scenario where Mersualt finds that he is in love with Marie, and agrees to say that he will try to let religion put him back on the right track, even if he didn't plan on believing it. If Mersault actually cared about anything, he would make the necessary sacrifices to allow that thing to continue to be a part of his life. In the original rendition of "The Stranger", Albert Camus has Mersault show, however, that he cared more about his dignity, uniqueness and lack of conformity than he did about anything else in his life. The last part of the book is the part that usually reveals the moral of the story and that was certainly true in this case. Had Camus told about how Mersualt discovers that he cares about Marie, the moral of the story would show the power that a love connection has. In contrast, I interpreted the moral of the original story to be that some people have strong minds with unique, and unorthodox beliefs that are more important to them than anything else.