Ann Packer\'s Short Story Horse With Geoffrey

Ann Packer's short story "Horse" with Geoffrey Becker's "El Diablo de la Cienega."

Comparison and Contrast -- Ann Packer's short story "Horse" versus Geoffrey Becker's "El Diablo de la Cienega."

Victor, from "Geoffrey Becker's "El Diablo de la Cienega" and Elizabeth from Ann Packer's "Horse" are both individualists who excel, in different ways, in solitary pursuits. Victor is a young star basketball player whose skills draw the attention of a man whom he believes is the devil. Elizabeth is an introverted, bookish young woman who excels in reading. However, these two characters are both forced by external family circumstance to come out of their introverted shells as they realize a more expansive version of their evolving adolescent selves. Both characters must draw upon reserves of strength they never knew existed within their souls.

For Victor, the conflict the young man is engaged in, is a masculine narrative of excellence exhibited in a one-on-one basketball match with a man whom he believes is the devil. For Elizabeth, the female adolescent protagonist's narrative of self-exploration is not a tale of success but of failure, namely her failure to become the girl whom she believes her dead father would have preferred to have as a daughter. Victor's success and Elizabeth's failure are both created, in narrative terms, in an artificial way -- that is through the rules of 'game play.' Games provide the narrative structure to both tales and the rules for these young adolescents to find themselves in the world. However, because Victor's narrative is a narrative of masculine, outer competence, the single tale of a basketball game drives the story of "El Diablo de la Cienega" in a much more concrete fashion than in "Horse." Victor's much more clear and literal way of looking at his life also results in the narrative of the basketball game creating a sense of a neat structure to the tale, as opposed to the more emotionally complex and less linear, inner journey of Elizabeth. Elizabeth finds herself grappling with not only the immediate physical demands of a game, but also the physical demands and stresses that her own physical body's perceived lacking place upon her psyche.

Elizabeth's perceived gifts in reading, furthermore, are not admired as unequivocally as are Victor's have upon her psyche. Victor sees himself confidently as a gifted athlete, while Elizabeth sees her body as inadequate to the demands of the game she has chosen to prove herself at. Thus the game functions differently in the narrator's perceptions, the structure of the tale's evolution in a linear or a more discursive fashion, and also in terms of whether the character sees the structure of the game as frustrating, as in the case of Elizabeth, or holding the potential for salvation or damnation, as does Victor. The competitive crux of the game-narrative in "Horse" also takes place off-stage, because it is less central to the character's positive development, as opposed to the more physical Victor and the more physical life of the young male protagonist, in "El Diablo de la Cienega" where the game is the story, in essence.

Of course, one should not overestimate Elizabeth's maturity as a protagonist, simply because she is more manifestly intellectual in her vocabulary and pursuits than Victor. Both of these protagonists, are to a degree, somewhat stunted in the way that they view the world, not simply because they become obsessed with structuring their lives according to a basketball game or mimicking the writing of the cheerleaders on the sidelines. Because Elizabeth has lost her father, she experiences a terrible sense of lacking in terms of her life as a young, developing woman. Her new life in a single parent household creates a sense of a loss of herself, as well as a sense of a loss of a parent.

Victor and Elizabeth both are driven to close, yet highly conflicted relationships with their surviving mothers because of their status as children in single-parent families, although, again because of gender, this causes Victor to see himself as a kind of parental or surrogate father and husband to his mother, while Elizabeth sees both her mother and herself as bereft because of her lacking a parent. Victor's greater sense of competence, despite his greater youth in years, almost makes him seem more mature than Elizabeth, though less cerebral as a character.

The two stories remain striking in contrast because both deal with such 'real' events as loss, yet both have characters that seek fantasy worlds, in the case of Victor, or fantasy selves, in the case of Elizabeth, as a way of understanding and controlling real-world circumstances. The reality intrudes in the form of class, death, and parental inadequacies, and the 'control' imposed by the narrators takes the form of games and role-playing of high school identities. The white-gloved inhabitants of the world Elizabeth feels alienated from, or the fast and expensive cars desired by Victor are both beyond each character's immediate grasping, but in fantasy they hope to find the idealized versions of themselves that can find a place in such ultimately artificial worlds.