disappointing

 

I had a difficult time getting through this text. Honesty, this is the first of Katharine Ann Porter’s short stories that I found dry, and boring. So perhaps, for my online blog discussion, I will start with delving into what made this text so unappealing? The lack of character depth triggered my instant detachment. Never do we learn of the narrator’s back-story, interests, or even her name. Why did she feel the need to go on such a holiday? Why did she distrust her friend, Louise, so much? To briefly touch on the subject of Louise, I do not condone Porter for mentioning a character who could potentially have been a sneaky liar but never referring back to her. Louise served no purpose other than providing the narrator with a vacation spot. Why even mention her? The other characters, in the story, furthermore were unrecognizable as people, much less individuals. The narrator received the impression that her host family was “one human being divided into several appearances”  and that she could not tell one member from another, but they acted as one person. I disagree to the extent that I could not even mentally create one person from this family. All I know from them is that are blonde with blue eyes, hardworking, continually hungry, and calloused toward Ottilie. I felt their description of interests—dancing at the Turnverein, reading “Das Kapital” etc.—delved into shallow depth of who they were as people. Dialogue, in my opinion, could have helped readers recognize their humanity instead of categorizing them as a hardworking, dancing, stereotypical German family. To the extent of character analysis, the narrator suffers the most from lack of psychological depth. The one point where I felt we were about to penetrate into the mind of the narrator came when Fraa Mueller died. The narrator began to think about the circumstances around her and “realized for the first time, not death but the terror of dying.” My expectations fell with the truncation of the narrator’s introspection. Perhaps we were supposed to infer from her taking Ottilie away in the carriage that she acted upon this courageously upon this enlightenment, but truly, I felt like her self discovery came too late and was anti-climatic. Furthermore, unlike other Porter stories where the subtext creates a type of understory, the plot truly incorporated almost nothing exciting until the very end. Porter blatantly comments on Ottilie and her treatment as a social commentary and breaks the first rule of great narrative fiction writing: show us, don’t tell us exactly what you want us to know. The  superficial narrator, the stereotypical characters, the dry, uneventful plot, and Porter’s preachy overtones provoked  me to distance myself from “Holiday” and judge it—perhaps to harshly?—as one of Porter’s least developed works.