Have you ever read the short story titled ‘There’s a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella’ (by Fernando Sorrentino) ?

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TherMan.shtml

What do you think of the story?

As I read this short story in the beginning, the gist of what I have captured the narrator writing is whether the man with a strange habit does really exist or not. Or, if he did exist who was the man that was hitting the narrator in the story on the head without stopping. It sticks in my mind wondering who the strange man was to the narrator. Somehow, despite the agony of trying to understand the motive underlies the story; I was at first wondering what was the strange man had gone through actually and somehow I could feel the strange man’s plight humorous. Was it a medical condition that was driving him crazy? It’s rather hard for me to really understand the whole point of the story until it came to the end and after repeating reading it a number of times.

Based on the description the narrator described about the man in the story, I assumed that the man is an old man and came from rather an average community. This story has kind of deep meaning. There’s no such thing one real man can be with us all the time without eating, doing nothing except hitting people with an umbrella for the past 5 years uncontrollably no matter how the narrator tried to get rid of that man. From what I could see the narrator is trying to convey messages in a different way and the strange man is being used metaphorically in the story. Maybe the narrator has some kind of predicament or dilemma in his life for the past 5 years and it’s still buggering him and trying to put in the picture about people who can’t get away of the conditions that have imposed to them. It was an unplanned event and it’s kind of annoying to him even though in a very