miles.’ Here, I used ‘naked’ to imply a rawness of emotion and ‘isolated’ to reinforce the motif of aloneness in this example of objective correlative. The end of my story is a tonally mimetic parallel of my character’s emotional deflation: ‘As I passed out on the mattress, the room echoed with the pitter patter of rain on the Velux.’ I decided bathos would be an interesting structural technique to use after seeing it used by Murakami in ‘The Second Bakery Attack’. There is no big climax here, either – the penultimate paragraph explains how ‘the volcano was gone’, the hunger satisfied. In both my story and Murakami’s it is expected that there would be a climax of some description yet they are left hanging on metaphor and stillness, truncating the flow of the narrative and emotion. These bathetic notions are carried forth into the structure of the story. The first draft of ‘Rain on the Velux’ was based around a traditional start-to-end structure that I had seen in the work of Cheever, and notably in ‘The Enormous Radio’. Following this stringent linear structure resulted in the story becoming rather predictable and clichéd, so I took the decision to invert the pattern of narration followed by Cheever and write the story in reverse chronological order. I found this to create interesting tension points within the piece by beginning with the dull image of passing out on a bed and building the narration back up to a delayed revelation – this plays to the reader response story as readers are slowly given more insight into the narrative, layer by layer, until it is finally all exposed at the end and full sense can be made of the events in the story.
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