This summer I did not do anything that was surprised or scared me. The majority of the time my family and I stayed home because of the pandemic. There was nothing exciting or motivating to do outside that would have also followed the social distancing rules that I would have been interested in. The one thing I guess I would say made me feel good was taking a summer class so I would not have to take it during the fall or spring semester. It was stressful but I felt good after knowing I passed it. 

Of the three stories, my favorite was The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. I think this one was my favorite because of how dramatic the writing is. When I was reading I noticed how the words are chosen to manipulate the reader’s emotion and also change with the narrator’s perspective. The story is chaotic but I liked its chaos because when reading or watching something chaotic there is a relief at the end of the story that this isn’t your reality; the chaos ends with the last sentence. This is the only story, for me, out of the three that made me pay close attention to the word choice; that was most likely because I had to read sentences a couple times before understanding what they meant but in doing so I realized different things each time I reread. 

I liked the narrator’s reasoning as to why he did cruel things; not because I agreed with those things but because it was interesting to see someone try to justify cruel and evil acts as if it were something everyone does regularly. I’m referring to when he speaks about the spirit of perverseness. The narrator introduces this by saying “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he know he should not?”. The way they word it makes it seem as though everyone does these things, and therefore since you have possibly fallen victim to this ideology, you are not in a place to judge what the narrator has done out of perverseness as well. I think this type of manipulation of the reading is interesting and makes me question other events in the story. It was spooky and mysterious which I really liked.