The Music School story
A novelist reflects on his life and on the lives of those around him. It is loosely based on a 1966 short story collection of the same name by John Updike.
13 total · 6 major · 7 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| Catholicism | major | The novelist contemplated a policy change regarding transubstantiation, namely a shift from letting the Eucharist wafer dissolve to chewing it, as a metaphor. |
| creative writing | major | The novelist wistfully reflected on a novel that he never bothered to write in which the hero would have been a computer programmer. |
| human self-reflection | major | The story follow a novelist as he reflects on his life and times. |
| murder | major | An acquaintance of the novelist was murdered in his home. |
| music | major | The novelist loves visiting a local music school, which reminds him of the difficulty of learning to read and play music. The novelist enjoyed driving his daughter to and from her piano lesson. A young, cigarette smoking Catholic priest was entertaining some bar patrons with his guitar playing. |
| romantic infidelity | major | One gathers that the novelist is confronting his own latent impulses to be with other women than his wife: the novelist's protagonist had an affair, a woman at a meeting was embarrassed at seeing a man she presumably had carried on with, the novelist looked awkwardly at a cute woman towards the end. The novelist let it be known that he was being unfaithful to his wife. |
| childhood music lessons | minor | The viewer was shown various adolescents taking music lessons. |
| coping with sexual dysfunction | minor | the novelist's aborted novel was to have involved physiological complications regarding sex |
| early computer | minor | A couple of different scenes depict a computer scientist working with 1970s era mainframe computers. |
| extramarital affair | minor | the novelist's aborted novel was to have involved an extramarital affair |