Last Exit to Brooklyn

Reading response blog - Last Exit to Brooklyn You should not summarize or talk about “plot,” but rather highlight a particular aspect of craft as it pertains to character development, that interests you as a writer, or that as a reader enriches your reading experience and understanding of the story. Here is an example of what one of my classmates did for this assignment (DO NOT COPY THE PROFESSOR HAS READ THIERS). Out of the three short stories from “Last Exit to Brooklyn”, it felt to me that “Tralala” had the protagonist with the most severe mental decline due to the extreme contrast in writing between the beginning and the end. The story starts off with short sentences ended with periods with rarely any exclamation points or even commas and by the end, the last several pages are just one elongated run-on sentence. This style of writing at the very beginning of the section gives a very formulaic, unenthusiastic tone, which is confirmed by how Tralala is narrating. Although the first sentence introduces us to Tralala's first time being laid, her attitude towards the entire situation is uncaring and desolate, not even caring if she gave consent or not and simply looking back at the event in a factual manner as she states that “getting laid was getting laid” (93) and when the girls hated her she reacted by thinking “so what. Who needs them.” (93). Tralala through the story continues to reiterate that to her, intimacy is merely a way of making money through the use of her factually stated attractive body, continuously repeating the fact that she had attractive breasts whenever she started to lose confidence in herself. For Tralala, having sex or even being raped is a simple fact of life that has no impact on her except for the money resulting from it that she needs to get by. This black and white view of cause-and-effect seems to be the primary reasoning for her feelings of fury and frustration after her experience with Harry. With her own stained history, Tralala is only capable of seeing their interaction as an unfair betrayal with Harry unwilling to compensate on his end, and thus catalysts her mental ruin. This skewed interpretation of how sex and intimacy works prevents Tralala from even considering the potential of making Harry a romantic partner or considering the implications of the things he does for her, by contrast, she is infuriated that the “sonofabitch gives me nothing but a fucking letter”(106). Tralala's flaws as a human, created from her experiences, force her into certain numbness and obstruct her vision into a skewed portrayal of intimacy born from necessity. By the end of the story, Tralala is being pushed around to various people to try and realign her rules for the world again; that is, by being paid for her body. However, all her power is usurped from her as she falls victim, perhaps suggesting that despite her interpretation of being in control by using people's attraction to her for her own gain, she was powerless to the same rules she tried to play by.