Readers respond to...

Challenge 181

G. David Schwartz’ “In the Waiting Room” could be a short story or an essay; it’s a toss-up. In light of the ending, how does classifying it as an essay help the story?

An essay is analytic in nature. “In The Waiting Room” was anything but. It was an episode in which nothing at all seemed to make sense to the man waiting to see the doctor. It seemed a very bizarre episode in which everyone was misplaced, including the storyteller. Perhaps calling it an essay helped in the sense that it made no more sense than the situation at hand. I found it to be very entertaining.
Carmen Ruggero

I’m sure we’ve all been in a waiting room at some time and watched it fill up with newcomers. David Schwartz turns the experience into an increasingly bizarre “happening,” where the people become stranger and stranger as the room becomes more and more crowded.

At the end, we realize that the narrator is not in a waiting room at all but in an elevator, presumably on its way to the real waiting room. However, that scenario has a problem in realism: one doesn’t normally sit down in an elevator, and at least one of the characters does. I’ll grant a stretch and take the crowded elevator as a metaphor for the doctor’s waiting room.

Classifying “In the Waiting Room” as fiction would have made it a kind of “shaggy dog story,” where a long, involved complication leads to an anti-climax. Classifying it as an essay focuses the readers’ attention on the waiting room as a surrealistic experience.

Don
Why will the reader sympathize with the lady in Carmen Ruggero’s “That Gaudy Red Hat” but not feel sorry for her?

In response, another reader simply quotes the last three lines:

I feel a prayer coming on ... maybe not,
I’m angry, ugly, hairy, and unwanted,
but feel a lot better about the whole damned thing.

Well, yes... but do we sympathize with and yet not feel sorry for the woman because she’s angry, ugly, hairy, etc.? No, we don’t feel sorry for her because she doesn’t feel sorry for herself.

Don