Sometimes just the act of reading teaches us about ourselves as well as absorbing, concomitantly, awareness of technique and skills. Our reading informs and transforms us. Your response to Appel's homage to sadness is well done, concise, and illuminating. It suggests to me that you have learned a great deal from the technique of the story without articulating this acquisition specifically. You might find it useful to try to elicit from yourself how Appel's craft could be informing your own technique.
I have always thought of this story as an "Ode to Sadness." I always assumed "La Tristesse des Hérrisons" was an old French saying, but so far I haven't been able to verify this. Using this as a title tends to lift the story into an abstraction. Appel's use of dialogue to advance the plot and develop character is really outstanding.
On the other side of sadness is anger. So it seems inevitable the pent-up tolerance of unreasonable demands would erupt in a violent act of seizing the hedgehog with malicious intent. To end the narrative with Adeline, Josh, and the hedgehog, whose razor sharp quills have sliced Josh's left hand to shreds, standing together on the ledge outside their apartment window, about to plunge to the street---with the hedgehog leading the way, slipping from Josh's bloody grip, followed by Josh and then Adelaide---but we can only assume, because Appel has left them framed as if in a Polaroid moment, for the reader to determine what happens next.
This story also uses sections as part of the structure. The first story also employed the same device. I asked you then, and I ask you now, how you think using sections advances or affects the narrative?
Let me conclude that I really take issue with you not engaging my comments, especially when I have asked for your response to specific points and issues.
Go back and reread my entries and give me some requested feedback. Otherwise, we don't have a dialogue, just inconsequential speeches that fail to achieve an exchange of ideas.
It's time to move on to "Strings." See you in cyberspace.
