10 MINUTES OF CONFUSION

You've got a gift. What led you to write this?

Wow.

I'm very impressed.

So now it's time for a literary analysis from a bored penguin.
Bear in mind, I'm not certain that all these interpretations are correct, because I don't know exactly what it is you were trying to accomplish with the imagery in this. That being said, these were my impressions.

The wind is an image for the passing of time, bringing eventual death to all that it touches. It's presence here is almost unnoticed, and yet essential.
The narrator seems to be standing outside of time and space itself, and yet interacting with the time and space in a corporeal form, much like a ghost or a man trapped in a hallucination.

Indeed, this entire image can be taken as a hallucination, perhaps the dying visions of the very man who killed himself as mentioned in the third paragraph.

We see the man sweeping a parking lot, passing through cars and objects as though they were not even there, which seems to indicate a continuity. The man owned this building and this parking lot, and so probably swept the lot every night. In this, his dying vision, we see an irreconcilable paradox - human beings cannot pass through solid objects.
He appears to be the only constant in this situation, perhaps his dying brain captured the mindless subconscious programming that was drilled into his brain from years of sweeping the lot, and procured an image of him performing this task, combined with a sort of mental mosaic of memorable cars and objects from the lot. Because these two mosaics of activity cannot be completely reconciled with each other, he passes through objects as though they were not there - allowing us to realize that the man, just like the observer, seems to stand outside space and time, while interacting with it in a way that the observer cannot.

He pauses and wipes the sweat from his brown and leans against a door, his task finally completed. The observer notes that there is a beam of light shining down from the heavens, highlighting his face. This light can be seen as a redeeming goal, a hope for the future. Like a disgusting symbol of the futile desire that a failing man holds in his soul, the moth chases this bright hope for the future, taking wing to the sky, not caring how far or how long it will take until he reaches his goal, only caring that he eventually will reach it.
Perhaps the man felt, or knew, that the only way for him to achieve happiness in his life was to reach this unnamed goal - something that he secretly knew was impossible.

The skeleton walks by, an ethereal entity materialized out of nowhere, and informs the observer in passing that the moth died in pursuit of his dream, and spent three years falling before its dried and brittle corpse struck the ground.
We are then informed that the man killed himself by forcing a letter opener into his neck, an act of suicide so violently deliberate it could only be caused by a prolonged depression.
Logically it would follow that this moth, being the symbol of this man's hopes and dreams, died just like the man's dreams. Whether caused by illness or bankruptcy, or any other number of disasters, the man watched his hopes destroyed, and so spent three years falling through depression, feeling more and more hopeless, bitter and angry with every passing second.
This anger and bitterness eventually culminated in his suicide, which caused his hopes and dreams to crash to the ground, never to take to the air again.

Perhaps still in a secret, posthumous desire to save himself, the observer chases the skeleton, a symbol of his own death. In pursuing this spiritual revelation of immutable destruction, he is shown a disturbing vision of a father brutally and violently raping his own daughter while the mother helplessly stands by and watches.
This vision is perhaps a vision of his own conception, granted to him as a sickly morbid reminder of why his life was so miserable.
His mother, a young girl perhaps no more than 13 or 14 years old, had her life ruined by his birth. In his life, she saw only her own anger and resentment, and likely abused him violently in the same pattern that her father did to her.
In this abuse, he was given over to feelings of self-hatred and worthlessness - feeling that no matter how hard he worked he could never reach a point at which he would be satisfied with his life.

This final vision fades in a swirl of confusion, and we are granted a sort of epilogue, as the observer (the man) joins his fellow dead on a passage to an unknown destination; the afterlife, oblivion, or some unknown terror await him in the future.
As he looks back and sees the place from whence he came, he sees more of his kind still living; like inmates on death row, their deaths loom before them.
Rain begins to fall, a symbol of mourning - either his family mourning his death, or a symbol of his own mourning for those whom he knows will eventually follow the same path he took, never to return to life again.



Thoughts from Mr. N/A?


Also, just a note on the passage itself, there are a few minor things I would change around for the sake of grammar and flow.

For instance, the sentences that say:



You use the word "lifeless" twice here. Try changing it up, switch the second "lifeless" to the word "dead".
To avoid another redundancy, change the first "dead" to "extinct".




Next, the sentence:



First, "Its" should be "It's" (the contraction for "it is").
Also, the "And yet there over there there" could be adjusted to be a bit more comprehensible. Try:




The sentence:



Is quite the epic run-on. Try changing it to this to adjust the flow and break it up a bit:




This one is also minor, but at the start of the sentence:



You don't really need the word "And". The sentence makes just as much sense without it.


Now, the paragraph:



Quite disturbing imagery, and I don't want to tamper with any of the actual words here, just some of the stops.
Try changing the comma between "pajama bottoms" and "and all" into a period, and then delete the "and".




Finally, the phrase:



doesn't need the "and". "A hard rain begins to fall" would suffice.

The product of these slight edits would read like this:





Apologies if this offends, but the English teacher in me was very highly impressed by this superbly written piece. You, sir Landon, have quite the writing talent. I highly encourage you to continue in your pursuits, and I look forward to reading more material from you.

Hmm, I can see what you're getting at with the narrator being you. It makes sense.

The run-ons give it a good stream of consciousness, my inner grammar Nazi kicked in on those

The culmination of 4 years of college English classes and a lifetime of reading and writing is my analyzing random stream-of-consciousness pieces on a public forum. The system works! ;D

And I'm glad to see you liked my interpretation. That's what you do when you've got no life outside your girlfriend, the internet, and your hallucinations of grandeur (i.e. lording over an army of penguins in the Antarctic).

WOO
*does a dance*

More people need to read this.

i really enjoyed reading that.

That was great n/a.
You have skills that I could never have XD