Eli

Have you ever thought about all the things you don’t see, but you know are there? Like the police not serving and protecting the person they have in custody in the right way or a doctor hurting his patient. The police bring in their prisoner to the hospital where they budge past the line of moaning patients who have been waiting for hours, so they can be first and get out of there. Dr. Fitzgerald doesn’t like the special treatment the police assume they get just because they are in uniform, so he takes it upon himself to teach them a lesson by using the patient. In the story Eli by Vincent Lam there are three main elements foreshadowing,suspense, and conflict .

At the end of the story there is foreshadowing that is a big main scene. As the readers we know that the police women did mean to move away when Eli was going to bite her, just so the doctor would get bit. Dr. Fitzgerald did not like the attitude that the police were giving him and the way the patient was swearing at him. The Doctor wasn’t very pleasant to the patient nor was he kind to the police, so he decided to pretend to be on both of there sides. He told Eli that if he was seeing things that he would have to keep him over night and Eli wouldn’t have to go with the police. Eli didn’t want to go with the police because they were the ones who put him in the hospital in the first place “fuckin, playing drums with my head” Eli explained. Then the Doctor asked the police if they had noticed any bruising in Eli's body. The police didn’t notice. Dr. Fitzgerald still put it in the patients chart; the reader might assume it was because the doctor wanted the patient and the police to fight because the doctor slipped the patient a pair of scissors when he left the room “The scissors were gone, what can you say about that?...a doctor could lose track of one small sharp object”. The police had no idea.

Throughout the story the suspense really builds. We see the doctor feeling more and more frustrated with not only the patient but the police as well. “Shut up you piece of shit” Dr. Fitzgerald said to Eli as he was trying to stitch him up. We notice that Dr. Fitzgerald has been trying to look like he is on both of there side like he is there to help them both but really he is in it for revenge. It seems as though something could really go wrong and spoil all the hard work the doctor has done in trying to be deceitful to the patient as well as the police. The anticipation of waiting for something to happen is very suspenseful.

Conflict is a very useful element that the author portrays. First, the author makes the reader want to read more by using conflict between doctor Fitzgerald and the police officers in form of a while they converse. They both keep information that could be useful from each other. The officers don't tell the doctor what actually happened to Eli like how he was brutalised by them.  The doctor never reveals to the officers that Eli has the HIV virus. This leads to a lot of confrontations between the two occupants and brings about minimal trust. Vincent Lam uses the fact that the doctor has conflict versus his thoughts. The doctor has an internal conflict when he wants to help the patient by accidentally  leaving his scissors beside the patients bed, so that they could be of some use to Eli when he left the hospital; The doctor also made it easy for the police to continue there business with Eli once they left the building by telling them "[Eli] has got multiple bruises on his limbs and torso". There is a lot of conflict in this short story, like the doctor with Eli and the police,police with Eli, and Eli with having to be in a place where he doesn't want to be. 

Kellie.Eby