Wednesday, January 24, 2007

peninsula story

From Nora Ephron's book, I Feel Bad About My Neck:

A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula. The man's mother comes to stay with them, and then man goes off on a business trip. The woman takes the ferry to the mainland and goes to seee her lover. They make love. When they finish, she realized it's late, and she gets up, dresses, and rushes to catch the last ferry home. But she misses the boat. She pleads with the ferryboat captain. He tells her he will take her back to the peninsula if she gives him six times the normal fare. But she doesn't have the money. So she's forced to walk home, and on the way, she's raped and killed by a stranger.
The question is: Who is responsible for her death, and in what order--the woman, the man, the mother, the ferryboat capain, the lover, or the rapist?

Ephron's acquaintance says the question is a Rorshach, and if you ask your friends to answer it, they will all answer differently.

Most objectively, the rapist is responsible for her death.

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