Challenge 1048

Natural Goof-Up

In Robert Boucheron’s A Quiet Evening at Home:
1. Does Hughes actually kill Truslow’s dog or does he only think he’s killed it?
2. What is the dramatic function of Hughes’s losing his cat? What does its escape add to the story?
In Gary Clifton’s His Excellency Cometh: How might the story be set in a different cultural context?
In Robert Nersesian’s Safety Last: What meaning do Armen’s name and his grandfather’s role as an imaginary football spectator give to Armen’s quest for football stardom?
In Zachary Reger’s Murder in the Wind:
1. Is the story a modern fable; namely, a story that illustrates a moral and depicts as characters animals that think and talk like human beings but act like their own species? Example here. The answer may be: “entirely,” “partly” or “not at all.”
2. The experimentally derived crows refer to themselves as “intelligent” and the natural crows as “Mute.” Does the distinction consist entirely in possessing human language? Since natural crows are commonly credited with an intelligence and, at least, vocal communication of their own, how else might the distinction be made?
3. Does the experimental crows’ artificial nature make them “mute” in their own way, namely unable to communicate with natural crows? Do the experimental crows constitute an imaginary new avian species? If so, does it justify their debate on the evolution of law?
In Edward Ahern’s Sharing the Rock and Robin Helweg-Larsen’s An Outbreak of Humans: Rather than abandon the shoreline rock to a rattlesnake, what could another fisherman do that might confirm that humanity is a disease despoiling the universe?

Does “An Outbreak of Humans” imply that the Creator might consider human life a cosmic mistake? If so, what remedies might be proposed?

Responses welcome!