A Fortune By Joy Monica T. Sakaguchi

When life passes along, it tends to happen so fast, that you first realize what is important afterwards. Nowadays people have a bad habit of thinking that money is the key to all great things in life, instead of appreciating the things that money cannot buy. Valuable and fortunate thing like love, family and faith. It can even make you question if people are so ignorant, that they need a cookie to remind them of their fortune. In the short story “A fortune” written by Joy Monica T. Sakaguchi, we enter right into the head of main character. The story is about a young guy, who has been brought up in a socially unstable environment and now has become a pickpocket. One day he observes a young boy, who is being treated bad by his father, and unexpected

He cannot stop observing them, as the father keeps on yelling at the little boy. This reminds our narrator about his relationship with his own father, and all of a sudden, he is standing in front of the boy, offering to help him. “I don't know what compelled me, but my feet just sort of walked over to him before I told them to.” ( p. 2 l. 76( As it is not his nature to help people, he is surprised himself that he ends up offering the boy to come home with him. The reason our protagonist feels an unusual wish to help the boy, is most likely because he can identify himself with the little boy. As he has observed the boy getting told that he is stupid and clumsy, he wants to remind the boy that he is a wonderful and worthy boy, because no one reminded the narrator about that when he was a kid. At home at the protagonist, he shows the little boy his collection of fortune cookies, and because the little boys are completely absorbed by them, he chooses to give all his fortunes to the boy. The fortunes has encouraged and brought some faith into our narrator, and now he wants to pass it on to the boy in belief that he will realize that he is

When he used words like ma and pop instead of mom and dad, it pictures the social heritage, and it clarifies the environment in which we are located. Besides that, he is also very generous with swearing and in his use of slangs like “greens” and “peckerhead” which once again underlines the background our narrator comes from, and the lack of schooling he had as a child. As the story is written in a first-person narrator, it gives the reader a subjective view on the story. As we get a personal influenced view on the story line, it is hard to tell what the little boy really is thinking. “I saw him standing in the same position, staring at me with an odd expression on his face.” (p.4 l. 156) This is a clear example of how the narrator gives us external descriptions of the boy, which in some cases is influenced by the narrator. Especially when he is describing the boys father, he uses words as yuppie-looking and peckerhead, which is a very subjective picture of the father. And this also indicates that our narrator has some serious issues with the upper class, which also leads back to his upbringing in a trailer