Stone Animals

I figured I would go ahead and post some of the thoughts I had on Stone Animals that I planned on bringing up in class today.  Often times during this story I found myself saying, now what exactly is going on here?  Of course this was not an unusual circumstance to find myself in, as most of Link's stories made me wonder that, but in this story I think the confusion I felt was the point of the story.  The characters in this story are striving for their image of the ideal life.  Catherine and Henry want a beautiful home in the country where they can raise their family together.  However, all the circumstances are working against them achieving their goals.  Henry continues to travel to the city to work, leaving Catherine alone to deal with two troublesome children and another one on the way.

As their utopia begins to crumble due to these circumstances, even stranger things begin to happen that make it so they cannot have what they want.  Catherine becomes strangely obsessed with painting the house, objects and rooms in the house become haunted, and of course, their lawn become overridden with hundreds of rabbits.  These situations only serve to confuse the characters in the story, while they continually strive to make things exactly right despite the strange circumstances that have befallen them.  

This story seems to function by constantly pitting opposites against each other, for example work and home or reality and dream.  These are things that normally coexist by maintaining a careful balance, but this balance is never achieved in the story.  The boundaries between them get so confused and blurred that it becomes difficult to tell one from the other.