Narrative Summary and Analysis:
The story that I chose was “Exotics” by Callan Wink, which was under the American Wild section. This short story focused on the main character James, and his journey one summer after his girlfriend breaks up with him and his experience as he moves to Montana to Texas to work at a ranch over for a few months. The few supporting characters include Carina, his lover who he cheated on his girlfriend with, Casey, James’ brother and Linda, Casey’s wife, and Karl, James’ boss at the ranch in Texas. There are also brief mentions of interactions between students of James’ and Carina’s, who are both teachers.
There are a couple prominent themes portrayed through this telling of James’ experience. James life of spontaneity and exploration and desperation as he leaves his relationship and works as a ranch hand and sleeps around is juxtaposed with that of his wealthy lawyer brother, with a wife and baby on the way. The author comments on these different lifestyles but doesn’t necessarily say that any one is better than the other. The title “Exotics” comes from a term the ranch owner uses to describe lost or escaped ranch animals, and when James sees a zebra, he ponders how out of place it is and yet will most likely be hunted and treated as any other buffalo or deer in the wild.
Network Graph and Analysis:
I chose to create nodes of all the characters mentioned, and defined the edges as any conversation or any mention of a shared experience. I created a chart based on these relationships between 2 characters, and then created the network on Google fusion and I came up with this.
The graph does a good job of clearly showing the relationships between the characters, and for someone who has read the story, it effectively represents the different segments of the narrative which and mostly defined by who James is interacting with. However, since it is a pretty simple and straightforward story with only a few characters, I don’t think it really does much that the writing itself doesn’t do. Additionally, without the background of all the characters and their relationships, the graph tells very little. For instance, James relation to his brother Casey is much different than his relationship to his brother’s wife, which is different than the married relationship between Casey and Linda. Yet, all these edges are portrayed the same way with just a line between nodes. I think if the edges could be labeled with more qualifying data about the characters, this network graph would be much more effective in its portrayal of the narrative.