Thoughts: "Under The Microscope" by John Updike

The "The Early Stories"
is a book collection
of his short stories and
his other early works.

A story about an experience of a cyclops at a party set in an untypical pond, one that is not his kind of pond. Many organisms accompany him during the going of the party, most especially the party hostess daphnia, a rotifer, and an odd water mite. Observations, of the vivid and of the disturbing ones, on the nature and on the complex interconnections of the party and its partygoers slowly unfold in front of the cyclops's only eye. He eats, then he gets eaten, then what's eaten gets eaten. Then the story ends.

Having read the short story, it quite felt that the tone of the narrator was a little bit unexcited about the story itself. No sound of thrill seemed to have escaped the narrator's very vivid and very scientific use of words. As it described the pond as "slightly acidic", it felt as though a minute sting of acid actually came into contact to the senses.

In the story, it is quite apparent that the cyclops felt a bit indifferent to his new surroundings. Again, putting emphasis on the story's opening line "it was not his kind of pond", it can be really said that the cyclops is the foreign entity at the party. The party-organisms, mentioned and named by names very scientifically, could have felt the same way towards the cyclops, but was never explicitly stated. They were as though completely different from one another. But then one might ask, "what is the cyclops supposed to be doing at the party then?" Perhaps, what is being tried to point out here in the story is the un-obvious yet seemingly factual coexistence of polar characteristics and personalities in one place. That it is not something unusual or out of the ordinary, but is something that is normal and actually happening and is true. 

The story, with its overbearing, and perhaps explicitly overstating, title "Under the Microscope" is simply trying to bring us to a whole different, and apparently invisible, new world to all of us that is its readers. It is trying to open our naked eyes to a world that is equally true and existing, too. As much alike as what one can experience when trying to look at an ordinary sample of water using a microscope, where, at first look by the naked eyes, is truly and clearly just an ordinary sample of water -- clear, liquid, and reflects specks of light -- but yet upon looking through the magnifying lens of the microscope, one is brought to this other spectrum of seeing where he or she can now actually perceive what else comes along with this ordinary sample of water. There, one can see what cannot be seen at first. There, the un-perceivable can now be perceived, and the unknown is rising to the surface to be known.

It can be put into belief that John Updike was perhaps trying to present, through this short story of his, an unapparent yet concrete example of the point he was subtly trying to make. He made use an immense number of discouraging, purely scientific terms to compose and tell his story of nothing else but ordinary and very common life thought. Somehow, it poses a challenge and test to its readers, and to their persistence as well, into actually reading and understanding this simple short story. How foreheads wrinkled upon the first sight of those almost incomprehensible scientific terms that clothed Updike's story, which actually rendered and ended so insignificantly to the real story itself, seems a bit of a big hint already of what John really was trying to tell us, right?

If you are interested, here is a copy of the short story "Under the Microscope" by John Updike:
For a copy of the whole book collection, click here!

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