The Background

Dear Readers,

 I wanted to discuss the impetus behind this story. I wrote it for my Creative Project for AP Literature.

My theme for the project is uncertainty and how people react to it. How do people live with the idea that you could die or something awful could happen at any moment? If you think about it, this is a universal experience. Everyone lives with death. It may be your grandfather or your relative. You might not think about it, but every day is a day you avoided countless disasters.

In this story, I’ve tried to develop this by forcing the main character, Robert Damon, to come to grips with this idea. Due to a horrible accident, he’s a man living with limited time, a man with one of those “Jack Bauer from 24” clocks on his life screen. And when confronted with this, Robert reevaluates his life and realizes what is truly important. I hope that the story will help people understand how to deal with this fact and how we should then live.

My tone is thus curious. I’m exploring Robert’s emotions and his character development through the most eventful day of his life and then drawing a conclusion from it.

Obviously, the medium here is a fictional short story. The word count is similar to other projects and it really isn’t anything different from others.

I’ve tried to use three elements – those of characterization, emotion, and irony.

Robert is, I hope, a three-dimensional character. He starts off in the story as a selfish, driven, ambitious man. He doesn’t want to think about death. The accident forces him to think about it and he begins to loosen up. I think a literary parallel would be Scrooge in the Christmas Carol. I think this element should be evident to anyone reading the story. By the end of the story, he’s slowly transformed to a man who has come to grips with life and reordered his priorities. He’s more kind, considerate, and less irritable.

I hope that emotion also comes through in both the diction and the plot line. I’ve tried to convey his inner musings and guilt as he begins to see his life for what it really is. This doesn’t happen all at once but slowly. He notices the tiredness of his co-workers. He realizes his son doesn’t know him. He realizes he’s never taken Cynthia to the park. He realizes he’s neglected his family. He realizes that he’s not done right by those who love him and care for him.

The third element is irony. I think there’s a lot of irony in the story. Death comes with the dawn. He begins to be nice to people on the last day of his life. He finds success just when he realizes it isn’t important to him. He makes a great discovery but it is overshadowed by the other discovery he tried in vain to get before. I hope it’s pretty consistent through the story.

There is also symbolism. The Damocles virus is a name that alludes to the famous story of the sword of Damocles. The virus strikes in an unpredictable way. What other symbols can you spot? I hid at least three more.