Here are your LAST TWO stories before Spring Break! Please read both of these short, but strange stories, and answer two of the questions below for Wednesday's class:
Q1: In “Horse Legs,” when Hanzaburo abandons his wife and runs off into the wild, a newspaper article comes out condemning the government for “having neglected our urgent need for a law prohibiting insanity” (141). Why does this article seem to think going mad is a choice, rather than an affliction? And what does he seem to think it allows normal, working class men to get away with?
Q2: What do you think Major Kimura means in “The story of a Head That Fell Off,” when he says, “It is important—even necessary—for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can’t trust ourselves” (119)? Is this the true moral of the story? Or yet another unreliable narrator imposing his view on the reader?
Q3: Despite the level of satire, “Horse Legs” is also a kind of modern-day fable or fairy-tale. What might be the metaphorical significance of a normal man, in a normal job, who suddenly dies and returns to life with horse legs? How might this represent something ‘real’ in our own world? Do people sometimes wake up with ‘horse legs’? (not literally, but symbolically???)
Q4: When the Chinese soldier, Xiao-er, looks back on his life on the moment of death, “he recognized all too well the ugliness that had filled it” (116). What ugliness do you think he (and Akutagawa) is referring to, and how might this connect with previous stories we’ve discussed?
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