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Debbie Nguyen Creative Writing Reading Response - White Angel October Michael Cunningham writes White Angel in a first person’s point of view. In this case, it makes the story more personal and makes the entire event more relatable to the readers, after all, it’s easier to connect to a story that is told in a personal perspective than a third person’s point of view. I felt as though the relationship between the two brothers were very important, but seeing that Carlton was 16 and Bobby was 9, the fact that Carlton taught bobby anything was a turn off. In the story, bobby learned how to smoke, drink, and even knew about sex through Carlton’s mentoring. In some cases, it could be sweet that even though there is a 7 years difference, the brothers were still close, however, a 9 year old drinking and smoking is far being my personal preference of characters. However, a big thing that poked me about this short story was that the author thought it was beneficial or good to place the big bomb in the beginning of the story. This is referring to Carlton dying. Cunningham says, “Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour or so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white.” When I had read this, I thought he was referring to another drug related term, however, after reading more into the story I realized that Carlton actually dies. He runs into class and blood gets spilled and his girlfriend is the last person he sees as he dies in her arm. In telling the readers that Carlton is going to die ahead of time, it takes the impact out of the ending when he does actually die. Personally, if I had written the story I would have changed this aspect so that the climax remains the climax. It occurs to me, however, that even though the story is in first person’s perspective, it is also being told years after the event. Maybe the fact that Carlton’s death was placed in the earlier paragraph was due to the fact that he wanted the readers to feel a sense of nonchalant, numb, attitude toward the event. It was almost like indicating he had accepted the death of his older brother and that this story’s focus is on death, but also of him maturing. Therefore, there were aspect that I didn’t like in the story. The idea of boys and drugs and experimenting at a young age is rather cliche, however, I enjoyed the fact that you see a transition in Bobby throughout the story. In the beginning he was more of the student. He was always in Carlton shadow and was admiring him in everything he had done from smoking to having sex in the outdoors, however, at the end you see him on the edge of the bed comforting his own parent. It was a surprising character change from the younger boy we had seen before, especially when Carlton never taught Bobby comforting mechanisms. In the end, White Angel dealt with moth coming of age for the characters as well as the issue of death in both a creative and innovative way. Michael Cunningham chose interesting styles to captivate the readers, however, I found the entire thing to be lackluster....