In the Heart of...Paraguay?

The thing that I noticed first while reading the two stories is that they are both kind of abstract and digress. They don’t clearly develop a straightforward plot or storyline that is so easily followed. Also, obviously, they both take advantage of the use of headings. However, compared to “Debriefing,” they don’t lead us anywhere but are more instructive, as they tell us generally what that section is going to be explaining about the place.

There is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty that I noticed in “Paraguay.” The story will be going along and then all of a sudden something random, some sort of abstraction will just appear. Not necessarily irrelevant, but something less apparent. Nothing particularly “spectacular” happened, that I noticed. It just kind of trotted along, detailing observations. I was interested in the regular intrusion of parenthetical statements which often questioned or contradicted the statement that they were interrupting. I thought it was an odd technique that made me question its function and how it added or maybe even detracted from the story.

“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” was similarly vague sometimes, with some sections just rattling off lists of potentially little significance to the reader. One thing I noticed that also caught my attention was the fact that it jumped from section to section and between ideas very rapidly and seemingly randomly. I’m sure there was some “algorithm” (ha) for it, but was always skipping about between arbitrary thoughts that sometimes didn’t even push the plot further. In reality, there wasn’t really a stable plot, nothing steady to grip onto, probably due to the nature of the constant jumpiness, which was kind of disconcerting at times, but could be an interesting concept to work with--throwing the reader off and deliberately making them uncomfortable.