Being that my vocabulary isn't the most advanced in the world, I naturally found myself extremely frustrated with "Original Sin: A Short Story." Inferencing on my own instincts, and after many read throughs, I broke it down stanza by stanza,and connected the work with prostitution and rape. In all, the narrator, to me, felt as if he was describing a female who's wasted, or wasting her life doing these very things. The idea of rape came about in the second stanza in the introduction of a grandfather who had a wen in his forehead but liked "To finger the precious protuberance." I came to the conclusion that protuberance meant private part, and not for nothing a woman's private part is pretty precious. My thought of prostitution came from the last line on the third stanza where it states "Riding the rods, perhaps." In this very line,given my preconceived notion of rape, the character's grandpa is brought back up. Overall, what I was completely sure of was that whoever this person was, they were going through a tough time.
Now that I have gotten a hold of a dictionary I can proudly say I was so wrong with the whole protuberance thing being that it's a lump, or a swelling.This alone can destroy my rape theory, though, it still didn't change the tone of sadness and regret. Discussing the piece more in depth with some of my classmates, I came to new grounds. We came to the conclusion that whoever this person the narrator is describing is not only living in reaction to the past, but numbed to his/her present, this including their friends' lives. Though I gave the protuberance thing a lot more importance that it had to, the protagonist clearly had a strong tie with their grandfather. The relationship between them is made a mystery.
In the beginning of the poem the narrator uses a symbol in "nightmare." More specifically in the line " The nightmare stumbles past."Let it be known, the whole first stanza is a description of the relationship between the protagonist and their past. That line is symbolic because it is personifying nightmare, which is chilling to me. I can see the visual of the discussed character, laying in bed with eyes wide open, sheet over mouth as this beast passes by. What did I learn from this poem ? Carry a dictionary at all times.
