The Story of a God of Death

The Story of a God of Death

In a big and silence office building, a group of well-dressed young people are waiting quietly. “Is everyone here? My name is William Stephenson.” With a cold and serious voice, a young man wears a business suit and carries a folder walks in. “I will be responsible for guiding your during the internship, and you can ask me if you have anything do not understand.”

William is a god of death, who is now working on teaching and screening the new Death. The job of Death is to recycle the spirit of dying human bases on the spirit list. And before recycling, he needs to use Death's scythe to check up this people’s life record and memory, in order to confirm and judge if this people really deserve death and recycle his spirit. If someone who is benefit for the world, or if his existence can bring big changes of the world, then his name can be deleted from the list and exempt from death. However, that situation is not possible to happen generally, so the confirmation is just in case.

Looking at this young face, William thinks back to the time when he was taking the final examination before becoming a formal Death. The final test was to check up one specific human’s spirit and recycle it. The person on his spirit list named Thomas Wallis, and in order to complete the task better, William found him and observe him carefully. Thomas is a poor but diligent youth. He works in a factory during the day, and writes novels at night for his dream to be a novelist. However, his works have never been accepted by any publisher so far.

To know him deeply, one day William shows up in front of him and talks to him. Notice the Scythe William carries, Thomas feels curious and asks: “Why you carry a Scythe?” “This is the Death's scythe.” William says with a blank face. “Is this the scythe belongs to Death?” “Yes.” William stands up and looks at him calmly, “I am the god of death, and in fact you are going to die. The reason I come is to check up whether you should die.” unexpectedly, Thomas is not looks frightened, instead, he is so excited and asks: “are you an actor? Is this a new way to perform to audience?” Suddenly, there is an idea crosses his mind, and he hurried away.

Thomas begins to rewrite his novel, which is about William, the god of death he met. The new novel seems very successful that a famous publisher contacts him and agrees to publish his novel after he finishes writing. “The deadline will be December 16^th.”

With a wry smile, William, the Death who knows everything happens to Thomas, feels struggle in his inner heart. The deadline of Thomas’ novel is exactly his expected date to die. Isn’t it too cruel to a life that eventually has his first chance after so many efforts? Isn’t the spirit of a brilliant writer deserve continue to exist in the world?

The day comes anyway. The weather is very cold and streets are covered with thick snow. Thomas carries his novel draft and hurriedly runs to the publishing house. The deadline is today’s 4 p.m., he is excited and full of expectation. “Tick Tock…” the sound of the clock becomes louder and clear, like his heartbeat.

“Watch out!” with the voice, a carriage sped across the street. The draft papers float in the air, blind his eyes. Thomas tries to pick up his draft papers, but he finds out he cannot move his legs. In the blurred sight, everything turns into red, a Death carries the scythe is coming towards him. He has a familiar face, blank and cold, as always.

In the end, William becomes a formal Death. He watches a variety of life stories in the world, and collects them when the stories end. Disregard good and evil, no matter noble or humble, he knows he just needs to fulfil his job, come towards to the dying spirit indifferently, and feel the weight of life.

Response to “The School” by Donald Barthelme

“The School” is a short fiction presents the story with the angel of view of the narrator Mr. Edgar, who is a teacher of the school that witnesses and describes the things happen there. At the beginning of the story, the teacher is teaching his students plant the trees, but the trees are all died. Next, there are a series of death happen in the school describes by narrator: the snakes, herb gardens, gerbils, white mice, salamander, the tropical fish, and later even the Korea orphan and some parents. No matter there are certain reasons or the narrator cannot figure out the cause of some deaths, the matters described above makes audiences feel dark and a bit quirky about the plots.

But what I think makes this a good fiction is that the author try to guide audience have a thinking about life and death. In the story the narrator seems to avoid confronting the matter of death as an adult, but his students think deeper when they ask if its death that give meaning to life? In addition, although in the fiction there are many descriptions about death which make audiences feel depressed, still there are some positive emotional attitudes that shows in the story. For instance, the story starts when children are planting trees, and at the end, Mr. Edgar kisses Helen which is a symbol of love. Both this two parts suggests the hope and happiness of one’s life which the author wants to inspire his audience.

Response to "As We May Think"

1.      What is research like for bush in 1945? --What are the problems with it?

In 1945, with the influence of World War II, the sciences have been developing, and there are lots of researches appear in quantity during that time which likes a growing mountain for Bush. The scientists begin to devote themselves to the scientific research, which develops new equipment that help scientific progress and benefit to people’s life. However, there exist problems of scientific research. The ways to manage and summarizing the research conclusions are truly old and inadequate for people to extract the significant results among a large number of things. Therefore, Dr. Bush came up with the idea of memex to store the results of research.

2.      What is the memex?

Memex is a sort of mechanized private file and library which is envisioned as a device in which individuals would be able to compress and store all of their books, records, and communications. Memex consists of a desk with slanting translucent screens on the top. Memex provides connections between various data, and it is mechanized and is consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.

3.      Do we have anything similar to the memex today?

I think the memex is similar to hypertext today, since it can find books and films according to cross reference, and also provides the function to establish connection between information so that people can set up links to some microfilm and even add their own comments. It is similar to memex in the way of storing and organizing lots of data.