Blog#9 - David Sedaris

“The roof is covered with metal, and large sheets of corrugated plastics, some green and others milk-colored, have been joined together to form an awning that sags above the front door. It’s so ugly that the No Trespassing sign reads as an insult. ‘As if,’ people say.” This passage describes this house very well, it is a house of a person that affected David when he lived in Normandy. It was a old man and his family that lived in that ugly house, his wife and his daughter who was disabled. The old man only spoke French and was not really a friend of David’s before the man was sent to prison for molesting his daughter. He went to prison for couple of years and returned to the same house after and lived alone. David was the only person in the whole town that accepted the man and actually became friends with him. They talked for awhile until David became bored of him. As years past, the old man told David that he had cancer feeling sorrow for the man David provided the man with a couple days of happiness before his death. This passage above is very funny but as we read later on the chapter, this was place where someone very caring and lonely had passed away.

This chapter, “The Man in the Hut”, is very different from David’s normal humorous writing. He shows a theme of darkness to his stories, by writing about how hard it was for this old man to live alone after being abandoned from his family. The sensor detail in the passage above really does describe visually how ugly and disgusting this house was and then ends the passage with a joke, for the cherry on top. The voice by Sedaris in this chapter does seem to change to a more sympathetic voice. Unlike most of his stories where they were just funny to read, this chapter was different than the rest.