Arenas story “The Parade Ends” feels like a novel crammed into a short story. The energy of the piece if turbulent and cascading – each moment pours into the next and the reader is never given a moment to grab onto anything. A quick glance at the work is enough to understand that it will either be extremely tense and chaotic, or very slow and thoughtful. Arenas manages an interesting combination of the two by writing in such a way that the reader must constantly move forward, but is still given the room to process and witness the events unfolding.

Usually, long sentences packed into tight paragraphs cause the reader to “fall” into the prose. There is little rhythm or pause given, and so the style emulates the chaotic rush of the story within. Rather than describing moments and given them time to deepen and flourish, Arenas piles them next to each other, and urges each moment forth. Interestingly, a story can achieve this quick movement in two quite contrasting ways. Short sentences and fluid paragraphs encourage the reader to shoot down the page. Usually, however, this is done when either a play by play action is being described, or events are unfolding terribly quickly. The alternative is to have a tight paragraph packed with long sentences. Though slower to skim and read, this tightness and lack of control emulates the actual event, as often when things feel quick and chaotic, one is bombarded with a bunch of stimulus and doesn’t have the space or momentum to process it all.

Arenas, however, uses this tight prose in an interesting way by having it cycle back to similar motifs and moments over and over. Though it is chaotic and fast, repeatedly seeing the crowd, the fence and so on allowed the reader to grasp the moments just as the character might have over the span of a few days. The first descriptions of the crowds feel confusing and garbled, but numerous revisits give them structure, and the reader is able to make sense of the chaos through the characters eyes. What was once a swarm becomes a backdrop to certain key elements. “You” becomes more and more honed in as it appears time and time again in different forms.

Ultimately, it is the writing style of this piece that stood out to me the most. The never ending prose made it hard to skim, yet at the same time it felt difficult not to simply lose the words in the crowd of sentences. By the end of the work, it felt like the narrators voice gave the reader a chance to breath even though the chaos was still present and the words just as tight. This had the effect of highlighting the importance of thought and voice – the earlier visuals of the work lent a hand to chaos and confusion, where the emergence of the narrator’s voice and clear purpose allowed the reader to empathize and become more present in the work.