Response to Lydia Davis's "Television"

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Lydia Davis’s short short-story, Televsion. This piece was definitely easy to identify with and read through due to the speaker’s informal tone and the types of television shows the speaker describes. Davis gives the speaker a very dry, but humorous, and seemingly sarcastic, tone through her honest words. Each line seems to weave in and out of sociological and sensory observations as well. “We listen to the ads until we’re exhausted, punished with lists: they want us to buy so much, and we try, but we don’t have a lot of money. Yet we can’t help admiring the science of it all.” One of Davis’s advanced skills seems to be breaking down an experience without letting her prose turn analytic, or distant. Along with these details, Davis uses significant concrete images throughout each scenario. One of the most vivid scenes in which concrete images are described is when the speaker explains the emotions a father expresses through the tears that swell in his eyes with pride on a quiz show week after week. The speaker also describes other characters from the one quiz show that “is particularly good,” with great imagery. The mother, whom the speaker does not like, flashes a constant smile with her “bad teeth” and the boy who blinks at the television.

                Davis shows another huge strength of hers through her effective movement from topic to topic. Although she does number paragraphs from 1-3, she is able to create a rhythmic flow throughout the entire piece by covering several topics such as television shows, movies, connections between audience and characters, as well as her reasoning behind watching television at night to waste time, and still tie each of them together creating a satisfying closure. Each paragraph seems to go in chronological order as the day passes by which helps the flow of the story. The structure of this short short-story is also very unique in itself. Davis allows her story to be read easier due to her unique line breaks that happen frequently. Several times throughout the story Davis skips two or three lines between paragraphs and indents only certain lines instead of indenting the first line of each new paragraph.