The Great Gatsby is a great novel about the immobility of class in America, despite the country’s claim to the opposite. I didn’t realize this in highschool when I read it, but damned if it wasn’t a warning of things to come.
Not exactly a short story, but Kipling’s The Young British Soldier still tumbles around in my head some 25 years later. Really cemented in me that I don’t want to go die in some other country for some fabricated sense of duty to my country. Not that I wanted to at that point, but for sure made it seem like an extra terrible idea.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has entered the chat
“Class, today we’re going to start a VERY long lesson on allegory. It starts today with the reading of this short story, and it ends 30 years from now when you’re watching your last parent die in a hospital bed of old age with nothing you can do about it.”
Flowers for Algernon moment
Just think of the rabbits.
That’s a novella but definitely more disturbing and more universal than most of the short stories in this thread
That’s of mice and men tho right?
U ok bro?
I am! Thanks for asking.
I was riffing off the OP post. We’re exposed to ideas early in life (at school) that we don’t understand the gravity of until much later.
Watership Down (1978) was fucking terrifying as a child.
“Alright, class! We’re gonna read a story about a guy who locks himself in a hotel room with a decked-out kitchen, a surgery machine, and every prosthesis one could need, and this guy is gonna eat himself from the bottom up and describe it in careful, emotional, joyous detail!”
Yeeeeah, fuck that shit, decades later.
“The Savage Mouth” is the English title, by Komatsu Sakyou.
There was a Stephen King short story called Survivor Type where a doctor gets stranded on an island and eventually begins eating himself for sustenance. The story is told through the journal he keeps as he becomes more unhinged.
I have a similar reaction, but it was to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, about a woman locked in a room for a long period of time to deal with her mental health, and the solitude drives her quite insane. In quite haunting detail.
To be fair I think The Yellow Wallpaper at least has a fucking point instead of … what the fuck…
Fun historical note: many yellow paints and dyes used in that time period had some sort of neurotoxic heavy metal (probably mercury, IIRC) that actually caused or at least exacerbated symptoms of mental illness. Many of these compounds were relatively safe to use as paint in England, but when used in warmer, humid climates, they broke down and caused hallucinations as well as respiratory complications that caused the patients to be bedridden (further worsening the symptoms).
That’s really interesting, thanks for sharing! I wonder if the author knew that, or if yellow was just used a lot… (I’ve seen occasional older advice to paint kitchens yellow to make them “feel sunny”, but imho that’s not an easy color to live with. My mom had a patterned yellow antique couch that was just absolutely hideous… but it was the style at some point…)
Granted I haven’t read that story in a long time, but I think they knew about any of this at the time the story was written. However, I seem to recall that this was a fairly autobiographical story about the author’s experiences with post-partum depression and the “treatment” thereof, so it might just be that the cost the yellow wallpaper because it mirrored her experiences
Omg.
I got pictures of the text in English, further down my comment history. CTRL-F “autocannibalism”. I don’t have any Japanese copies, that was a long time ago.
CTRL-F “autocannibalism”.
Buddy no
Hot.
Very fun, gonna try to get ahold of it. Thanks!
Mang, if you want me to, I can just post it.
Yes please
I think everything here is in order and nothing’s missing, but I’m not about to reread it and find out.
What a delightful little read! Thank you so much!
Love you thanks!!!
Icky!
Highschool me would have LOVED to be assigned this. What grade were you in?
Fifth year or so. Something a teacher shared with me, that they probably shouldn’t have. It wasn’t mainline coursework, they just thought I was smart.
(Nope. Not smart, just have attention issues and look really smart at some things, and helplessly incapable at others.)
Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
Wasn’t even required reading for me. I was just flipping through my textbook one day and found that in one of the sections the class was never going to reach.
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
The reply to that just being “Yes, for the love of God,” was cold as ice.
Was that before or after the school-shooting lockdown drills?
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
Nuclear attack drills? I don’t think we ever did those, I’ve just heard about them from older people. How old are you? I thought those stopped in like the 80s or something.
I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.
Dang, things must be pretty good up in Canada. People are sending their children to first grade with ballistic-shielded backpacks down here.
There is a modicum of school violence in Canada, primarily in Urban/Metro centres, but not enough to cause general panic. Tue States has a pretty unique problem.
Funnily enough I did on a similar post a month ago.
i remember that post, was actually hoping to find it again as there had been some great recommendations! glad you mentioned it here.
That story still haunts me, and I’ve been trying to remember where it was from for over a decade.
Feh! Luchesi…
Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Randall Jarrell, 1945
I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.
Holy fuck who wrote this?
I should have attributed, sorry.
Randall Jarrell, published in 1945.
Bomber ball turret gunners and tail gunners had the shortest life expectancy of any combat occupation in the war, as these were the first targets of incoming fighters. I found one site that said tail gunners’ combat life expectancy was four missions.
Ball turrets couldn’t reload in flight. The ball was too small for parachutes, and the mechanisms jammed or froze often. Typically they put small, young, single guys in them.
Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.
I still can’t figure out why this is taught to children. What value does it offer, other than being generally well written, which a lot of other less disturbing stories also are? Did the teachers just hate us?
The theme I remember is that if established in a community and reinforced by tradition, any violence could be perpetuated and even endorsed.
I had blocked that one from my memory; I remember now. Thanks. ಠ_ಠ
I had this one used by 2 different teachers for different grades.
“Alright Class, today we are going to read “The Jaunt” by Stephen King and write a report about the effects of eternal nothingness on the human psyche” -my sick fuck English teacher in grade 7 for some reason.
I just read this as an adult a few weeks ago actually. Pretty dope thing to have read in class but I can see how it would make a lasting impression
I mean I loved it. We also got to read some ray bradbury and Isaac Asimov in that semester.
Asimov in school is a true power move, hell yeah. I did *read Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 and that book changed my (literary) life as a kid. My school was christian so good literature was few and far between
I’m jealous of anyone who got to do bradbury in class. I did a book report on him but there was no class discussion. I just reread Kaleidoscope the other day, one of my faves. Actually most stuff from The Illustrated Man was dope.
Oh we just read The Veldt, which was a bomb ass short story to get to read in grade 7.
That’s a great one. Maybe it’s time to reread the bradbury anthology collection I have. Some of his work can be a total brain bender
Yeah it was great for me because from grade four on I was super into reading horror and sci fi, and when we got to read them in class and all my friends also had to read it I got to talk about it with people.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas was this for me.
That one definitely fucked me up. Although it wasn’t an English teacher but a philosophy professor who had us read it.
I like my country, but not being born in Lithuania would have meant not reading Jurga Ivanauskaitė back at school and you all should consider yourselves lucky.
Is that a story or an author?
She was a writer, an essayist, a poet and a traveler.
A lot of her creations feature powerlessness of women in various dramatic events.
Holy fuck, what a thing to let kids process on their own…
I mean, we were 17-18 years old, but it was still something I wouldn’t choose to read.
The story I remember reading was about a mother of two young kids, during the events of January 13th.
The Soviet tanks roll by her street, towards the TV tower, she later finds out that her husband left home to defend it. It is not clear if he will come back. Historical context: only 14 people died that night, but the casualties were expected to be higher, because people went against the army with their bare hands.
The other event is how she goes to a doctor, because she is still lactating despite her youngest child being past nursing age. She goes there twice, the second time the doctor sleeps with her. She seems ambivalent about it.
The last part I remember is her walking on a frozen pond with her children. The older child finds a spot where the ice is transparent, and says:
“I see something. A land.”
Hence the name of the story, “A Land of Ice”
Ah yes, a nice short story about yellow wallpaper.
“Today, students, we are going to learn about Carcosa.”
Not a short story but I recall we read Call of the Wild in school. Some nice animal cruelty for kids to think about.
I don’t really remember any of the short stories assigned in English specifically, but I do remember one in my middle school textbook that I only remember because of the artwork. It was done by Stephen Gammel; the same dude that did the original artwork for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It’s especially memorable because the story was just about some cute anthropomorphic animals working on a farm or something, but it had the same crazy “spider webs dripping with blood” style from the Scary Stories books.
I hella wish I could remember the name of the story, or at least the specific textbook it was in.
