Prompt: Read Clementine, Carmelita, Dog by David Means.

Response: There were multiple craft elements that I appreciated in this story. First, I liked how the focus of this story was heightened by the sense of smell. Plot wise, it makes sense, due to the fact that the main character is a dog. Sense of smell is obviously more developed in dogs than humans, so instead of using sight and emotions to develop the story, Means relies on describing the scene in terms of scent. It was also refreshing to have an omniscient narrator instead of a dog-narrator. While it is technically in first person, as there are some moments of the narrator speaking directly to the audience, this allows the reader to be in touch with how the dog does not think like a human, instead relying on senses and instinct. The narrator gives the audience few hints of humanism during the story. These are mostly used to describe things in terms of a human outlook, as describing them through a dog’s perspective proves to be too challenging or unexplainable to the audience. If anything, I would describe this story as having a passive plot, as we are only given the dog’s perspective. There are context clues as to what happened to human characters, but there are really no emotions attached to any of the descriptions, except for the parts when the dog realizes that the death of his female owner causes scents to change around the house. The plot is driven primarily through instinct, conveying emotions only through the response of the reader. The dehumanization of a dog character, especially when dogs in literature and media are often created to be more human than some of the human characters, was refreshing to me. The lack of emotion from the dog and the pure instinct that drives the plot actually created a powerful narrative about grief, loss, change, and natural instinct.