English Topic on 'CONFLICT' comparing two micro fiction - Essay Example

She then goes on to describe what the neighbor would hear, and what she would think: “I would say to myself how glad I was not to be her, not to be sounding the way she is sounding, with a voice like her voice and an opinion like her opinion”. From this, the reader can infer that this person does not like how she sounds when she talks to this man, and perhaps she does not even like herself. The conflict is thus internal, precisely in being who she is. The conflict in this story is psychological, and we are not given the reasons why the neighbor would not like to be her upon hearing her voice and her opinions.

The narrator in fact stipulates that the neighbor would not like what she hears, and would be glad not to be her. One can say that this is a sort of projection upon the neighbor of the narrator’s own dislike of herself when she talks to this man. The dilemma is thus in this woman’s ambivalence between liking herself and not liking However, all of this up to this point has been stipulated on the supposition that she were not herself, i.e. that she were not who she was. She resolves this conflict by saying: “But I cannot hear myself from below, as a neighbor, I cannot hear how I ought not to sound, I cannot be glad I am not her, as I would be if I could hear her.

” Thus, to hear herself as a neighbor, from below, is an impossibility, as she is “not her”, meaning the neighbor, because she is herself, and she cannot put herself in the neighbor’s shoes and not like herself. The conflict is resolved in the final sentence: “Then again, since I am her, I am not sorry to be here, up above, where I cannot hear her as a neighbor, where I cannot say to myself, as I would have to, from below, how glad I am not to be her.” Given that this imaginary situation is an impossibility, the conflict is simply resolved by this