all because of the mistake

Yes, I think that by giving the character a name and an age would have made the story a bit better. Although it was general, and everyone could relate I think that as far as grabbing the readers attention it would have helped.

The first few lines of the story ,"there is neither a precise moment nor an agreed day, no forewarning conveyed by an external sign..."p.203. says alot. Sometimes people think that there needs to be a sign that something in your life is going to go wrong, that something in the universe will be able to forewarn you of bad things to come- however the narrator of the story expresses the idea that most of the time there are not any of these things, that sometimes mistakes just happen. Another message that I think was supposed to be expressed is that when you make mistakes, you are able to learn from them and do better next time. When the narrator forgot to open the flaps and risked running out of runway for take-off, Bruno still did not tell him what to do. He sat back casually, while the pilot was frantic and allowed him to figure things out for himself. Learning things for yourself, always helps you to remember the lesson in the end. If people were always giving you the answers and allowing you to take the easy way out of sticky situations, you would not learn have as much. Also I think that its ironic that on pg. 205 the narrator says that "WE forgot to open the flaps." Its obvious that there was only one pilot who made the mistake but I think in this short amount of dialogue we are able to see a little bit about human nature. When things go wrong, many of us are quick to take the blame off of ourselves and place it in the hands of others and thats exactly what the narrator did in this situation. Even though it was entirely his fault for not opening the flaps, he still tried to give partial blame to his co-pilot/instructor.

It says at the end of the story that it was translated from Italian. Critics have said that translations are difficult and alot of the time, pieces of the work is lost in translation. Do you think that from Italian to English any parts of the story were lost?