Storytelling and Style: Creating a Character, Research Paper Example

The old man wandered around his house for a day and a half in sunglasses that warped the world in the strangest of ways.  He saw colored lights at the edge of his vision and familiar items like the teakettle and the toaster grew into strange metallic creatures that seemed to hover inches above the counter top.  He thought for awhile that maybe he’d gotten a speck of glass in one eye, or maybe it was glaucoma. He’d found, as the years went on, that he diagnosed himself with countless illnesses. The problem was, too few of them were fatal.

In his private heart, when the front door was closed and his children had scurried back to their own homes and lives, away from the duty that was Dad, the old man wished himself dead.  Better to be in the ground then to live this half life of the elderly.  This surreal, pointless existence where everyone spoke to you too loud or too softly, where even strangers felt comfortable talking to you in the slow cadences he’d once assumed were reserved only for slow children who’d suffered head injuries.  In his mind, with his eyes closed, the old man was young.  Not a teenager, when he hadn’t understood how the world worked at all and was blinded by the arrogance of youth.  Not a young man in his twenties either–he’d been broke then, lonely and unhappy.  No, the old man imagined himself to be thirty-seven with the worst of his insecurities behind him and the problems of ageing still far, far off in the future.

“I’m young enough where it counts,” he said to the toaster, which glimmered but said nothing.  “I could beat those kids of mine at tennis or baseball or whatever, if only I had a different body.  My mind’s still sharp enough.”  The tea kettle seemed to pulse in the sunlight, growing overlarge, as if to mock such a baldly false assertion. When the doorbell rang, he was glad for the distraction, greeted the Jehovah’s Witness with open arms. “It’s these sunglasses,” he told the stranger, but now that he was in company, he felt old again. “There’s something wrong with them.  They make the world weird.”

The young man smiled a smile the old man knew too well.  It said that the smiler knew he was ancient and doddering, had never known him when he was thirty-seven and had the world fully in rein. “They’re 3D glasses,” the young man said, gently slipping them off the old man’s face. “Like from the movies?”

Vaguely, the old man remembered his granddaughter running around in the outlandishly oversized glasses until her mother told her to take those damn things off before she went blind.  The world around him was suddenly clear and without distortion.  Clear enough for him to see the pity in the Jehovah Witnesses’ pale blue eyes.  “Give them back,” the old man snapped, snatching the glasses from the young man’s weak grip and fumbling them onto his face.  “Give them back to me.  They’re mine.”