The First Flight Wd Vlgardson Summary

1040 Words3 Pages

Critique of “First Flight” The “First Flight” is an excellent short story that made pathos for the reader to portray in the life of an everyman who has to deal with exclusion and people’s bad choices. Gregory is an 18 year old who just wants to be sociable but everyone just shuts him out and doesn’t pay attention to him. He stops in a train station to warm up and is ridiculed on a false accusation of stealing a pilot uniform. W.D Valgardson perfectly shows both of the main themes. W.D Valgardson perfectly shows that loneliness and isolation often leads to rash acts of cruelty, and to suicide or death. He describes this throughout the story by showing Gregory getting falsely accused of stealing his brand new pilot uniform. The author continues …show more content…

When he went to the rink people made a choice of not including him and at the train station he was taken advantage of for his disability. The people at the rink chose to ignore him even when he heard a few of them giggling, even after he pounded on the door for them to let him in, making him feel rejected and hurt. At the train station their choice was to tease him because he was wearing a pilot’s uniform while he was not in the army. This led to him thinking that they actually thought he stole the uniform, which made him remember what happened to him when he did get caught stealing once. After that experience he was considering suicide and ends up doing it. The internal conflict of the story is the people against Gregory. The people of the city are choosing to leave Gregory out of all their activities and not bothering to talk to him even if he needed to. This describes his theme flawlessly because it shows no matter how hard he may try to engage in conversation or activities he is always denied in the process. The external conflict of the story is the walls around him making him unable to communicate with people when he should be allowed to. This is proved through out the story by the author making all the doors locked and the skating rink being locked up while people were having fun in

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