Lab six was not only fun but also simple. This has probably been the easiest lab that I have done this semester. I really enjoyed the entire process of it, really. I liked deciding what short story to use. I chose my favorite short story by Katherine Heiny (who is coming to the Ninth Annual Clemson Literary Festival by the way), _How to Give the Wrong Impression. (_Side note: I forgot to label the graph with the title of the short story before I scanned it. Sorry!) I chose this story mainly because I have read it about five times, so I know it well and also because it was the first book that I saw on my night stand. The story centers around two main characters, Boris and Gwen who are roommates but there is some underlying romantic tension between the two of them. It is told in present tense and in second person but Gwen is who the reader is identifying with.

When I went to map out my graph, the first thing that I did was go through and highlight and make a list of all of the characters that were in the short story. Because this is a short story that focuses mainly on just the two characters and their relationship with each other, I was not that surprised that there were only six character in the entire story: Boris, Gwen, Dahlia, Gwen’s classmate, Gwen’s boyfriend and Linette. After I made a list of these characters, I went back through the story and mapped out their interactions with each other. I could kind of remember to a certain extent who talked to who and how much from my many reads of this story but it was still interesting to actually read the story looking for that. What I found after looking for these interactions was the thing that really surprised me.

So, for the most part, Boris and Gwen had the most interactions. They had around twelve, which is four times any other interactions from any of the characters–but this makes sense because these are the main characters of _How to Give the Wrong Impression _and this is a romantic story between these two characters. But what really surprised me after doing this lab is that Boris had the most interactions aside from his ones with Gwen. Even though our story is essentially told in Gwen’s point of view (through a second person narration) Boris talks to a greater number of people a greater number of times. Both Gwen and Boris have one person that they talk to that the other does not (Dahlia for Boris and the classmate for Gwen), but Boris has more interactions with everyone else. This is shocking to me because Gwen is our narrator and it feels like she should be doing more of the talking. Another small thing that this lab showed me about this short story is that the female characters outnumber the male characters (4:2). But the males still have more interactions.

 

What I really liked about this lab is that it gave me a different view on a story that I thought I knew everything about!