how i feel about cock

The most interesting aspect of Cock to me was the convergence of the stories of Carol and Dan and the narrator talking to "the don" on the train. For the majority of the book, up until the last 15 pages actually, I was pretty unclear about the significance of the narrator/don story, questioning who the narrator really was and wondering if the don was the one narrating the Carol and Dan bits. However, starting on page 131, everything started to come together, not too quickly, but slow enough that it felt satisfying and not contrived at the end. After I finished, the questions I had earlier were all answered, and additionally I became aware that many passages that had grabbed my attention while reading were actually allusions to the end of the novella and the exposition of the don's true self. For example, the don tells the narrator at one point: "I like a story to tell me no more or no less than the storyteller intends. I don't go looking for hidden meanings, I don't try and pick away at the surface of things, pretending to find some 'psychological' sub-structure that I really have placed there myself" (102), and warns him more explicitly later:"I hope for your sake that you aren't regarding Carol's penis as anything but what it is. I hope you aren't deriving and signifiers or symbols from Carol's penis" (105). Initially, it is made very easy for the reader to assume that the story has some sort of feminist, anti-men message, and this is directly addressed in the above two passages. We see at the climax of the story when the don actually undresses, revealing both a vagina and a cock, that he had been hinting at the literal-ness of the story and Carol's penis the whole time in a way that the reader cannot really guess at until the very end. Overall, while obviously disturbing, I thought that the convergence of the two plots at the end was refreshing and kept me on my toes and interested in what came next.