I went cold turkey re: cigarettes yesterday, and had to write a 2 page paper on the characterization in a short story today.
It's only two pages, should be easy, right? Wrong.
I'm so scatter-brained right now, it's insane. My paper just jumps around. It goes something like:
-Existential Horror is everywhere, but it's rarely found in literature the same way it's found here! Also, the character grows for it.
-The story begins with a sense of timelessness, which comes to an end as the character begins his journey.
-The three other characters represent the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Or, in other words, they represent the three stages of life.
-Quotes showing that this was probably intentional.
-The growth is foreshadowed. In fact, the protagonist anticipates it, he just doesn't realize that this is what he's anticipating!
-For some reason I want to point out that water is often related to dreams, and water plays a prominent role in this story.
-Now I'm gonna try to pull all that together into a conclusion: The anticipation mixed with the ever-present sense of time causes the protagonist's existential crisis. He's helped through this by someone who is near his age, and has likely recently gone through a similar "growth" in person, and thereby comes out all the stronger for it.
I literally. just...
want to cry, when reading it through. And I don't have time to fix it, and I have a headache and my head is too all over the place to do anything worthwhile right now anyways.