not.
Pages read: 463-501 (Short stories: "Paingod" and "Ernest and The Machine God")
At the beginning of the story called "Paingod", the God in charge of giving people pain, Trente, is feeling no concern over his job. He doesn't really care, as he sees it as his duty. Although, inside, he sometimes wonders about what happened to the Paingods before him. He wonders what happened to them and why they were not able to hold their place as a God of pain. You're fast forwarded a few hundred years and Trente has contracted a sickness, of sorts. After the many, many years providing people with indescribable pain, Trente was beginning to care. I think he finally began to care after hundreds of years because it had been son long. He was finally realizing that he was causing people pain and anguish, so he was beginning to care about the people who didn't care about before.
The concern he was feeling was now turning into guilt and curiosity later in the story. He remembers the last man he caused pain to, and he goes for a walk in the man's shoes. For a night, he experiences the pain of Pieter Koslek, an overweight and overworked man with no life ahead of him. He was an alcoholic, and a very obvious one. He looked like it and he smelled like it so much that it was hard to tell if he was an actual person or not. The night that Trente decides to live the life of Koslek, he dies in the bar he was drinking in. Trente moves onto Colin Marshack, a man with hands that just won't stop shaking. While in his body, Trente realizes that he was the cause for this man's horribly painful hands and the cause of this man dying inside. instead of making Trente want to stop his duty, this makes him want to cause even more pain. He says, "I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain there can be no pleasure."
I don't really understand why you can say that pain is the most important thing in the world. But this is what made Trente change his feelings about his job. He wants to do it more than ever and he was inspired to cause much more pain. He also realizes why the other Paingods no longer held their positions: they had been overcome by concern. Trente knows this now, so this is what made him want to send even more pain out in the world. His new goal to send out pain makes him feel like a humble and kind person, but also the person with the highest rank in the world. He felt this way because he was Paingod, and this meant he was sort of automatically believed in by everyone since everyone experiences some sort of pain. He saw himself as a kind person because he believed there could be no pleasure if there was no pain, so he saw himself giving people pleasure rather than pain. I chose to write about this story because I think that the main character in this story changed their feelings more than any of the characters in the other story. I mean, in this story Trente goes from feeling no emotion, to feeling concerned and guilty, and then all the way to wanting to give people more pain. In the other story, the main character went from scared, to angry, to happy, and then dead. Not a very dramatic change, so this story was better to write about, and I think a better story in general.
At the beginning of the story called "Paingod", the God in charge of giving people pain, Trente, is feeling no concern over his job. He doesn't really care, as he sees it as his duty. Although, inside, he sometimes wonders about what happened to the Paingods before him. He wonders what happened to them and why they were not able to hold their place as a God of pain. You're fast forwarded a few hundred years and Trente has contracted a sickness, of sorts. After the many, many years providing people with indescribable pain, Trente was beginning to care. I think he finally began to care after hundreds of years because it had been son long. He was finally realizing that he was causing people pain and anguish, so he was beginning to care about the people who didn't care about before. The concern he was feeling was now turning into guilt and curiosity later in the story. He remembers the last man he caused pain to, and he goes for a walk in the man's shoes. For a night, he experiences the pain of Pieter Koslek, an overweight and overworked man with no life ahead of him. He was an alcoholic, and a very obvious one. He looked like it and he smelled like it so much that it was hard to tell if he was an actual person or not. The night that Trente decides to live the life of Koslek, he dies in the bar he was drinking in. Trente moves onto Colin Marshack, a man with hands that just won't stop shaking. While in his body, Trente realizes that he was the cause for this man's horribly painful hands and the cause of this man dying inside. instead of making Trente want to stop his duty, this makes him want to cause even more pain. He says, "I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain there can be no pleasure."
I don't really understand why you can say that pain is the most important thing in the world. But this is what made Trente change his feelings about his job. He wants to do it more than ever and he was inspired to cause much more pain. He also realizes why the other Paingods no longer held their positions: they had been overcome by concern. Trente knows this now, so this is what made him want to send even more pain out in the world. His new goal to send out pain makes him feel like a humble and kind person, but also the person with the highest rank in the world. He felt this way because he was Paingod, and this meant he was sort of automatically believed in by everyone since everyone experiences some sort of pain. He saw himself as a kind person because he believed there could be no pleasure if there was no pain, so he saw himself giving people pleasure rather than pain. I chose to write about this story because I think that the main character in this story changed their feelings more than any of the characters in the other story. I mean, in this story Trente goes from feeling no emotion, to feeling concerned and guilty, and then all the way to wanting to give people more pain. In the other story, the main character went from scared, to angry, to happy, and then dead. Not a very dramatic change, so this story was better to write about, and I think a better story in general.
I commented on the blogs of: Amelia, Sarai, and Stanley.
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