Critique: “Life Audition”

My initial reaction to this story is more of confusion than anything. I am trying to grasp mainly what is being said overall about the “life audition”. What key aspects that lead me to this confusion are that the writing seems so much more focused to explaining how the narrator, a father, is convincing his son about the theory of “the audition of life” than actually describing exactly what the theory is and all the details about it. I also found the story is more of someone telling me what happens than the story acting out what happens. Some scenes can be written in ways that make them flow more with the story. Even though I can take great interest in the plot and that drives me to read on, I still find it hard to comprehend an end to this story there is no clear message overall, the story still leaves me questioning what is this “audition of life“?
First or all, the story is structured in a way that I do not find easy to read and would not encourage this form of plot development unless the writer can make it work. What Stimmler has done is explain the “audition of life” by using the explanation that the narrator makes to his son in order to convince him to believe in it. That way of describing the “audition of life” works, there needs to be more explanation on that matter.
However, the real confusion is within the subject of the entire story, all linking back to the title. “Life Audition” is misleading towards what the message or main theme is actually trying to display. I find myself continuously asking, “what about the life audition?” and not getting my answers. There seems to be too much talk about an accident leaving a man battered and disgruntled along with several children being saddened and afraid of losing their father’s sanity due to tragic accident. I’m uncertain where Stimmler would like to take this story, but since she has chosen to talk more about the broken family and less about the “life audition” then it seems perfectly clear that the title does not fit.
As for some other issues with Stimmler’s story is she makes some great details that I wish were drawn out more in actions and things that the characters do rather than simply explained. Such an instance is when she describes the character Jenny as following the typical middle child “patterned” behavior while growing up. I am really interested in learning more about this “patterned” behavior of a middle child, for one I am a middle child and I do not know how Jenny and I could relate on that level, but also it is an interesting detail that could be used to clear up confusion as to how she becomes effected by the accident. There seems to be a lot of these unexplained details and that’s most likely where I got lost in my overall analysis of the story.
Mainly there are some points made about the story being unclear, which can be easily fixed by changing the title, which is putting a lot of weight down on the focus to the plot that does not line up with it. Also there needs to be more focused detail on how the children are reacting to the accident, and the details that are already there need to be explained more through action and dialogue with the narrator. I found this story to have an interesting philosophical perspective, but because of the story’s lack of vivid and clear description it brings down the value of that message.