"Shirt-Worthy"

“Shirt-Worthy” starts out with a guy explaining how the journey to coming by a shirt makes the shirt more valuable and that he never found the right occasion to get his own shirt from a band. He went from being a concert goer to being a father. His son asked him for a shirt from a band, so after his long speech about how the journey with the shirt made it so much better, he went out and buys his kid the shirt. His kid ripped it and instead of the father sharing the wise knowledge that the rip made the shirt better he just replaced it.

The conflict for this story is hard to tell because the author jumped around in time with different stories. When you consider all the story it seems the main conflict was that the author had not found the proper occasion to purchase himself a band t-shirt. The author did finally end up with a band t-shirt because he could not let a shirt go to waste. The authors point was to show how the journey and trials you go through to get the shirt makes it more valuable to the owner. The author did not come out and say the point but because he ended and began with the subject of the shirt and how what you went through with the shirt makes it more valuable. This story is timely because I have never really thought of t-shirts meaning so much to one person and I can now begin to associate experiences with clothing. This story is for fathers, concert goers, and t-shirt wearers.

The author moves the story along and is good as expressing feelings through descriptions. This author did a good job of incorporating a strong voice. I could really identify with the author because he shared his thoughts and feelings through the way he states things. This story would have been better if the author had chosen only one event in time. It was hard to distinguish between points because he had a couple going on and he did not come out and say it at the begging of his narration. The author left a lot up to the reader to decide. This was an effective way of getting the reader to think but left a lot of room for confusion.

He kept the characters and dialogue to a minimum. He explained events that another person went through without explaining their character type. He generalized his characters. He described his kid covering his eyes with his arm as something all ten year olds would do and not something unique to his kid. Even though the change in time and stories made the stories confusing the author distinguished between the time changes through subtle clues. He did not come out and say “when I was younger” or “in the year of …” instead he incorporated terms that indicated where he was in his life. Using these subtle clues also made the reader think.