The Everlasting Struggle

The Confounding by Steve Sanfield is undoubtedly “A Paiute tale to be told aloud”. “Still pthers say it is about ourselves” – the simple story of the very complicated outcomes. Every creature in the world chose what it wants to be: a bird, a fish, an animal. A human being chose to “live with the grace of gods in the world; love in harmony with all the living things” and gods gave humans the whole world as home for humans took the most responsibility of all the other creatures. Harmony and brotherhood was the result. But fear destroyed everything after Coyote was tempted by Unupit to break the rules and start eating flesh. Since that time fear became dominant in the world, but not brotherhood. ‘Lust and greed were alive in the world” and fear of the others was in the heart of every living being. Because of fear the common tongue has been forgotten. Every group of creatures separated and thus became weaker because of fear. It is still fear that stops us from getting that initial harmony and brotherhood back – “Off Missing Persons” speaks about this loud. Jack Finney is the writer who possesses the unique narrative manner “to speak into your ear”. The story “Off Missing Persons” was published in 1957 but it could not be more suitable time for reading “into it” than today. The story’s protagonist - Charley Ewell, a bank-teller, simple, but honest, who feels that life should not be such plain and lonely: “I see more movies than I want to, read too many books, and I’m sick of meals alone in restaurants”. Charley admits that he wants to escape from fear and worries, “from selling the days just to stay alive” as this is not the type of life suitable for a human being. The travel agency, which offered a perfect way out – go to Verna – where everybody lived happy, doing what he wanted to do and living in brotherhood. The agent, who explained Charley everything warned him that this opportunity is only one in a lifetime and there would not be the second chance - he should have thought hard about his desire of escaping. Charley was amused by the “living” photos of “happy people that, you knew they’d been happy, day after day for a long, long time, and they always would be, and they knew it”. Charlie decided he would go to Verna and he made the first step – went on bus to the “point of no return”. He looked in the window of the bus and saw drenched, angry people with harassed and strained faces – that was the world, from which he was about to escape. When he got to the barn – the place, from which he was going to be taken to Verna – a sudden splash of fear urged him to go out of the barn. Several seconds of hesitation and fear and absence of absolute faith made an …