Cole

Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story is a short story that has a couple different levels in it, if you read it from a Marxist stand point. I took this whole story as a type of class genre type of story. Being unable to move from bracket to bracket because of what you were born into. But the entire atmosphere of the story reminded me of The Bicycle Thief, just a grim, dark life. "They are, for the most part, honorable, educated, hard-working, shallow, and moderately unhappy young men." That was even talking about the somewhat successful lawers and men in the bar. If they felt that way, how should Sarah and her friends view life if all the did was package TV Guides. "The three women were not close friends, merely fellow workers at Rumford Press, where they stood at the end of a long conveyor belt day after day packing TV Guides into cartons. They all hated their jobs," And I also think that was something to looking into, it delt with the media and the concept of being hyponotized by the television. "The door closes. The man walks around the sofa, snaps on the television set, and sits down in front of it. He picks up a TV Guide from the coffee table and flips through it, stops, runs a finger down the listings, stops, puts down the magazine and changes the channel." The way this was written, it made me feel like he has done this a billion times, almost like a zombie. Like a robot that has no choice in the matter, I don't know if it was meant for that but that is kind of what I got.

I think a Marxist reading would make you look for the darker sides of a story and the atmosphere of this whole story just makes me sad and depressed. I hope to God this is never my life. It reminded me a lot of the atmosphere of the movie The Machinist with Christian Bale, just very gloomy and I guess that is what they are going for, trying to show that it just doesn't work. People aren't happy in the system and it needs change. Just sad how it ends that Sarah wound up going back to her class, with her ex husband. Maybe that's how things work out but lets hope not.