The final scene of the story was a great way to end, having the American who swindled peasants out of money understand what it's like to be on the receiving end. After the way he had acted as though he was so much better than the peasants and their attempts to fool tourists, he had it coming to him to finally be cheated out of something himself. The Turkish professor in the story, I believe, shouldn't have felt disgraced. After spending a day with this rug seller, I would want him to stumble across some misfortune, and the narrator didn't do anything more than translate anyway. He didn't have much of an influence in either the American's or the peasant's decisions. And will he ever see the donkey-selling peasant again? Probably not. There were a few parts of this ending that made it difficult to read or annoyed me. One was this: If the narrator thought the rug was nothing more than a dirty cloth, what are the odds that anybody else would think differently? I doubtmany tourists would be drawn to a dirty, supposedly ugly rug just because of how many stitches it held. Also, it wasdifficult to distinguish exactly who was talking at which moment in the story, due to the translations. One thing I did enjoy, though, was how the reader didn't know that the peasant wasn't trying to cheat the American until the very end of the story. It made the effect a lot better.-Peyton
P.S. 2,500 liras (if I'm correct) is equal to 125 dollars.
Hey Peyton,
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that the final scene was a great ending to a funny story. But that's just the point. A lot of the posts in this blog have been saying that they don't understand why the guy felt disgraced. I believe that the man's overdramatic feeling of being at fault for the American's mistake just makes the story even funnier! There's some people who are melodramatic for everything ( like me!), and I think that the author made this guy voice his feelings of guilt very loudly so that the American's mistake of trying to trick an innocent peasant is heightened. And since this is supposed to be a satirical and ironic story, shouldn't it be as funny as it can?
~ALim BookChomper
I liked how the American was fooled at the end of the story. I agree that it was funny since he thought that he was going to outsmart the peasant but instead he was outsmarted by the peasant. The rug expert probably got too confident when he thought that he could fool the peasant that he didn't see that the peasant was tricking him. Only when he noticed that he was being tricked it was to late. He said, "It's never happened to me before. Everything is the same as elsewhere here, but thes is a different sort of ploy." This quote shows that he was expecting the peasant to give him the cloth, but he wasn't prepared to not get it.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I also wondered why the rug expert was so interested in a rug that had a lot of stiches. How is it very very valuble?