Fiction Packet #3 Response

    These stories were pretty fun to read. One stood out a lot to me.. basically jumped right off the page and drew me in. The Falling Girl by Dino Buzzati. I have lost two friends to suicide and I got kind of a different perspective in this story. I noticed it was much more than suicide though. Themes like superiority and peer pressure stress came up as well in the story. 

    The different floors of the skyscraper showed the superiority issue in the story and in the world we live in today. Marta was 19 years old and she was at the top of the skyscraper to begin with. My understanding was that she worked her way up to the top, but she was not the best looking one there, especially among the girls. She wore cheaper clothes than the other girls and she didn't feel like she fit in. The pressure of trying to fit in to the higher powered groups was too much. I feel like that is why she jumped. 

    I noticed another issue in this story; the fact that no one really cares until it's too late. It wasn't until Marta jumped that all these groups she was trying to fit into reached out to her, literally. She was already doomed and decided her own fate and that's when all these people tried to get to know her, help her, ask her what was wrong. 

    Once she got to the lower levels though, I felt like they didn't care as much. I think it was because they knew she had worked her way up to the top and once you get to the top, it's fate that your ending will not be pleasant. They seemed to just say, "Yeah, the pretty ones always fall." 

    I think that today's society was well represented in this story. There is too much concern about looks and popularity and it puts people under way too much pressure. That's what I think the deeper meaning of the story was and I found it extremely interesting.