Talking Dog

I didn't know if I would like this story when I first started reading. The title makes it seem like the adventures of a talking dog, but the story is mostly about the family. It seems like an ordinary family, but a lot happens to them in the story. The death of the father kind of just passes along. There isn't much description. This seems to be a reflection of what the family is like, distant from one another. They deal with things on their own. Jimmy says at the end of the story that the older sister "had powers," and the younger sister disagrees. Life is ordinary for most people, and it ends so abruptly like the father and the daughter in this story. Maybe Jimmy sees something remarkable about that ordinariness. He was always trying to be extraordinary himself, and he doesn't amount to much by the end of the story. Melanie asked if it would be better from Jimmy's perspective, and I think it would be interesting to see the family from the outside looking in.

In the last line of the story it says that Jimmy would love the older sister more for pretending to talk to a dog. The dog represents dead people in the story, so maybe he means that by talking to dogs she was trying to make some sense of death. Everyone else in the story seems to move along without thinking much about what happens. The younger sister says that Jimmy would always "prefer [the older sister's] smoky opacity to" her "transparent face" (pg. 504). He sees some mystery in the older sister, and maybe he connects this mysteriousness with the mystery about life and death. Even if she was only pretending to talk to dogs, he would forgive her because she was trying to find some meaning.

Why does the author include the detail about the mother's views on race? Does this tie into the theme of the story?

Talking Dog

I agree with the previous post, I don’t think that the narrator’s sister had forgotten Jimmy at all. In my opinion, the image of the talking dog reflects her grief. She is mourning because of Jimmy’s dead and she imagines that dogs are sending her messages from him. Also, when Jimmy comes back, she goes away with him without caring that she’s already married. This shows that she was still in love with him. I think that what they had can be called true love because they were somehow linked to each other, like destined to be together, and sometimes it seems like they knew exactly what they were feeling without them saying anything. An example of this could be the fact that when Jimmy came back, he already knew where the older sister was, it’s like they had already planned to meet again. It also seems like Jimmy already knew that she was married because he wasn’t surprised at all when the little sister told him the news. It’s like something magical that is beyond the reader’s understanding unified them. What makes me doubt about their love is that the older sister left Jimmy when her mother came to their shack. “Going for lunch? Jimmy said. But we all knew they weren’t. Mother told me to get in back. Jimmy looked in and I saw him notice my sister’s suitcase.” (pg510). But it’s interesting that Jimmy didn’t do anything to stop her from leaving. “He did nothing to stop us – that was the strangest part. He let me get in and let us take off and stood there and watched us go.” Maybe the older sister really had powers and already knew that she was going to die.

It’s hard to say what was really going on between them because the story is told from an external point of view which is also a subjective point of view. The little sister says that her sister forgot about Jimmy, I don’t think that’s true, but maybe that’s what the little sister wanted to believe. She was kind of obsessed with Jimmy since she didn’t care about her sister’s death as long as she could have him.

I like the fact that the story was told from the little sister’s point of view because we can see how frustrated she is when she can’t have what her sister has. When Jimmy came back, he didn’t care or realized that the little sister had waited for him, but instead she took the big sister back, even if she was already married to someone else. The little sister is jealous of everything that her older sister has, everyone seems to love her because they all believe that she has powers, but the little sister doesn’t seem to get any special attention from anyone. I think most of people that have big brothers or sisters can relate to this feeling, because sometimes having an older sibling is like having an example to follow, and not being able to follow it or not being able to have the things that the other person has makes it very frustrating. Although this only happens when the younger sibling is still very young and doesn’t know quite yet what he really wants, so he just wants what the older sibling wants. I think this story portrays very well the selfishness and frustration that a younger sibling could have towards an older brother or sister.

I like the fact that this story seems to be realistic, but it inserts a supernatural side, the image of talking dogs. The reader never knows if the big sister really knew how to talk to dogs or if she was only inventing everything as the narrator said in the end, “I wanted to tell Jimmy that my sister didn’t have powers. (…) I wanted to say that she’d lied to us all, she’d faked it about the dog”. But the fact that Jimmy believes that the sister can really talk to dogs and that she has powers, makes the reader doubt about this being true or false. I really like this kind of stories that mix reality with fantasy and make the reader think that something supernatural could be happening in the real world.

Do you think it would have been better if the story had been told from Jimmy or the older sister’s point of view?