I was profoundly captivated by Jake Wolff’s presentation of his recent work, The Orphan Disease. This short story was one of the most original literary pieces that I’ve ever experienced as a listener, due to the unique types of characters and the one-of-a-kind plot that focused on the well-being of an ailing youngster hailing from an under-developed nation. The work was also excruciatingly suspenseful, and riddled with masterful motifs. Jake Wolff is an extremely original writer and orator who knows how to create and communicate a thrilling piece of fiction. I found Jake Wolff’s writing chillingly relatable to my own life. For example, I actually applied to Columbia University, and I’m a chemistry major, which is similar to the educational…show more content… For instance, a simile was used in order to describe the vast quantity of medical professionals who populated themselves in a surgical room in order to observe the Haitian girl’s procedure. In order to allow his listeners to visualize the setting in this portion of the story, Wolff stated that the room was filled with, “…a sea of white.” This quote means that, since medical teams are typically characterized by a vast majority of people as those who wear white coats, the comparison of a white sea to a large number of medical practitioners served as a meaningful visual cue to the listeners, including myself. In addition, clocks and time served as the main motif throughout the piece. For instance, as the surgical machine enacted its work in the removal of the child’s heart, the time in which it worked was explained to be rapid, then slow. In addition, the narrator realized that he had watched his life slip past him as he waited for others to leave his life, or to take a long amount of time in becoming a part of it, such as his parents who had passed on, and his crush, Alexander, respectively. However, when the little girl’s life was on the line due to a mechanical failure, he took note that the audience became like himself. The general motif of time served to indicate the fleeting moments of life, and showcased the concept that life is temporary, and no matter how fulfilled a life may be,…show more content… The piece was called The Scarlet Ibis, and featured a loving little boy who was frail from a terminal illness. The boy in this story was very similar to the girl in Wolff’s work, due to the fact that she expressed love by smiling at her specialist before succumbing to the anesthetic. In addition, the boy had an older brother who despised him, and was part of the cause of the boy’s death. In much the same way, the Haitian child was detested by the American community, since she was to be immediately deported to her mother country once she received the highly risky and experimental care that she needed for her well-being. In both pieces, the children were related to young birds, who were delicately crumpled on the cold earth due to their societal abandonment. I greatly enjoyed both stories due to the emphasis of the loving nature that both characters expressed towards others, in spite of the fact that they were seen as outcasts by society, as well as the analogy of frail children to young birds, since the comparison serves as a highly compatible, demonstrable, and applicable
