“Miss Brill” played a lot on the narrator’s mood to drive the story. There was almost no action in the story, but through the voice of Miss Brill the reader gets a very vivid idea of her character and her outlook on life, she is positive, happy, optimistic, but we also see, at the callous, inconsiderate comment of the young man, that she is also very sensitive, and it was these emotional shifts that drove this story.’

“Carnal Knowledge” made use of one sentence to set the tone of the story; “And then I met Alena Jorgensen.” This then sets apart his normal life from his short stint with Alena and animal rights activism. Because of the excluding then and his awakening from “a bad dream” at the end of the story makes the entire story feel like and out of body experience, something that happened to him that was almost surreal, yet also very real in the detail he gives us, not only about his experiences, but also his emotions towards Alena. Part of the irony here is that it seems he is caught up with this new cause that gives purpose to his life, but when Alena left, he went to his regular life as if nothing really happened.

“Summer” was a bit unique compared to our other stories in that it was nearly all narration, there were maybe two or three sentences of dialogue in the entire story, which kept the tone of this story as a nostalgic musing of a better time. It was nice though, and the voice here works very well; David Updike did not have to struggle with the difficulty of having a first-person child-narrator, but he still managed to evoke a sense of youthful naiveté in Homer.