The story “There Was Once” by Margaret Atwood is mainly about a disagreement between two speakers, speaker A and speaker B , respectfully. Speaker A is the storyteller and speaker B is the listener, however you’ll soon find out he does more then listen. To his best ability, speaker A tries to retell the story of Cinderella, but speaker B keeps on interrupting his story to throw his two cents in and makes corrections to what he sees fit. At first I thought speaker B was interrupting on purpose just to be annoying, but I was wrong. He was trying to send us a subliminal message. He felt that the story was too fictional and lacked specific detail, so he wanted to add more reality to it.

In the first paragraph speaker A talks about how there was once a poor girl who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the suberbs. Speaker B doesn’t agree with the word choosing, he believes since she lived in a house, socio-economically she wasn’t poor. Speakers B continues to show the same pattern throughout the story , correcting Speaker A. The point he’s trying to make is that you can’t be too naive when reading a story. You can’t believe every single detail thrown at you just because you can’t prove that it’s not wrong or just because it fits in to the storyline so you don’t want to doubt it. I even make this mistake sometimes when I watch a movie or read a book. I will ignore little things that don’t make sense just so I can continue and enjoy the rest of the story. I know some people who just focus on every single word and detail , just like speaker A, but in my opinion you can’t enjoy a story if you question everything that doesn’t make sense to you. I believe it’s better to accept everything the way it is and with an open mind and a little imagination you’ll be able to enjoy every movie or story you come across.

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