The Impact of English 103

     In Accelerated Composition 103, I have gotten the chance to read many short stories that I would not have been introduced to otherwise. All of these short stories had a deeper meaning and I usually did not grasp this meaning until we went over it in class. I think it is interesting that an author can write a story that could mean one thing literally and something completely different when it is analyzed further. The stories that I enjoyed reading the most were the Stephen King stories. The stories we read were "Harvey's Dream" and "Boogeyman". I liked "Harvey's Dream" because it was different than a lot of the stories we have read. In this story, a man is suspected of having alzheimer's disease. He wakes up in the middle of the night and does things around his house and sees his neighbor come home with a dent in his car. His house phone rings and his daughter is on the other end of the call and something seems to be wrong. She sounds like she is hurt and when he wakes up in the morning he thinks he dreamed the phone call. When he starts explaining the story to his wife, she starts realizing that everything he said he did had been done in the house. She starts to panic and then the phone rang and the story ends. The audience were left to choose if the man character has alzheimer's of if it was just a coincidence. In "Boogeyman" a man went to a therapist to talk about how all of his children have been killed and it was his fault. He says that his children always woke him up crying and looking at the closet. After all of his kids were found in their cribs dead he found out that there was a boogeyman in the closet so they moved to a different house to try and escape it. After a while, the boogeyman ended up finding them in their new house. The man would leave his children in their room even if they were crying and obviously scared, because he wanted them to be able to sleep in their own room. All of them, however, ended up dying and he feels like it is his fault. At the end when the man left the office there was no one at the front desk so he went back to ask the therapist about it and he walking out of the closet and pulled off a mask and it was the boogeyman. Once again, the audience was left to decide if the boogeyman ate the therapist, or the therapist was the boogeyman the whole time. In both of these stephen king stories, the audience was left to decide the ending of the story and what happened. I was interested the entire time in both of these stories and they were by far my favorites. My dad is a high stephen king fan and loves reading all of his novels, so reading these stories has made me want to read more of Stephen King's writing. here stories had made me become more creative and think about things for myself. I think t has also impacted my writing and I have learned by reading all of these stories how to write better.