Welcome To The Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

This story was very interesting. It had a great description of the setting and the plot was very unique. It was like foreseeing the future with a over capacity population and thus very unique ways to keep population under limit. It was very interesting that Vonnegut came up with such a story in the late 60s but it was most likely because that was when the baby boom occurred and he probably thought it would go on and we would eventually overflow with people, which, who knows, might happen in the future. Vonnegut wrote a way we could deal with it with the way technology is going, we could just be able to come up with such a pill and kill people with consent. It created a unique image of the future about like 200 years from now. He created an image to pretty much, in a way, warn us that life will be like a living hell if we let technology control us and take over. This story overall was very interesting and different compared to other stories we have read. 

HitchHiking Game

In the short story, the Hitchhiking game, the man plays the active, possessive role in the relationship while the woman plays the secondary, passive role. The theme of artificial or fake love is apparent throughout the story because although the woman wanted him to be completely hers and she to be completely his, it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something”. In love, something that partners must both have for each other is self respect, consideration and a sense of care towards one another. The man refers to the woman as “his girl” highlighting the possessiveness he has towards her, his need to own her rather than consider her, her own person. Because the man treated her so lowly, it eventually makes the woman feel like “in solitude it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment from the presence of the man she loved”, telling the reader that the woman was slowly losing her sense of identity because he thought of her as an object as Kundera states, “he worshiped rather than loved her…to him her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn’t exist. Beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself.” These two individuals are on two different sides of the spectrum when it comes to this relationship and their roles. The saddest part is that, this is only the beginning of their honeymoon and their life together. If, it even gets that far.