The Holiday: An Ecocritical Short Story

The Holiday is an imaginative short story written based on the studied literacy theory referred to as ecocriticism in short. The fiction scrutinised how the environmental issues, the cultural issues that affect the environment as well as the attitude of the residents of the island to nature. The story shows that some of the individuals go to the extent of throwing kitchen waste from their kitchen windows to land wherever they shall. As the story shows, the sweet and elegant shape of the once tourist attraction beach has completely turned into a foul-smelling heap of rotting waste and carcasses.

Running head: CREATIVE WRITING 1
Creative Writing
Student
Institution

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The Holiday
“Sir Benjamin was a complicated case, but I thank God we have finally won,” Douglas
said as he sat at a reception desk in his secretary’s office. “Indeed it was a tough case boss, but I
am also happy that we have finally managed to set our client free after so many struggles in the
court,” said Catherine. “Ms. Catherine, I feel tired, I would like to take a one week holiday,”
Catherine suggested to Douglas to take a few days off to Vietnam.
“My God, this suit looks great” Douglas spoke to himself as he observed his expensive
Kiton K-50 suit in front of the large wall mirror that was molded on his bedroom wall. He took
his phone to call his personal driver who promised to pick him up in the next few minutes. As he
had promised the taxi driver arrived within a short period of time driving his expensive hammer.
He picked Douglas and headed to the airport.
Douglas arrived at the Diamond Sea hotel in the Da Nang City in Vietnam at around quarter past
eight in the evening. He met a young lady at the reception who introduced herself as Florence.
He felt too tired as he had travelled in the economy class in the whole a thing which he was not
used to as he had been used to the first class in all his past flights. “Is there any vacant room?”
Douglas asked the receptionist who was busy perusing the booking books. “Yes, sir only one
room is remaining though it will cost around $ 100, 000 per night.” He nodded in an agreement
to mean that he was ready to book the room. One could see the amazement on the receptionist’s
face as no one had booked that room in the last one year due to its price. Douglas went into his
room, took a warm shower and headed downstairs where he met two girls at the swimming pool.
“Hey girls, can I join you?” Douglas asked as he approached two girls that were sitting near the

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swimming pool. The girls looked at each other before they simultaneously nodded as a sign of
acceptance to his request. He introduced himself to the girls who in return introduced
themselves. They informed him that they were from the Ho Chi Minh City. They were also on
holiday as him. It was the first time for Douglas to hear about the city. He got to learn from the
girls that the city was full of nightlife, friendly people as well as good street food though
pollution and traffic jam was a menace in the city. The night was approaching fast, and Douglas
was feeling exhausted after the long day traveling. He bid goodbye to the girls as he went back to
his hotel room. Back in the room, he rested as he browsed Facebook.
The following morning, Douglas decided to take a walk around the Da Nang city. The city
featured lawned grounds a thing which made Douglas very happy. As he was walking along, he
came to a place where he found a gang of special motorbikes which really looked different from
the motorbikes he was used to at his home place in US. He approached one man who was
comfortably sitting on his motorbike as if he was waiting for something. The man introduced
himself as Gregory. Gregory informed Douglas that the special motorcycles were referred to as
“chopper” as by the look they all had a greater angle on the front folks than the ones Douglas had
been used to in his home area. The man who was a Vietnamese by his look was very friendly to
Douglas. His friends also looked very friendly as they continued telling Douglas more about the
special motorbikes. Gregory offered to give Douglas a free ride on his chopper on a promise that
Douglas was to buy for him lunch since the times were hard due to what Gregory and his friends
termed as the recent pollution of the Ly Son Island hence scaring away tourists who were there
major source of livelihood. They went to a hotel which was roughly five kilometers from where
the motorbikes shed were. Douglas really enjoyed the ride on the special motorbikes. What even

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amazed Douglas more was the nature of food in the city. It was very delicious. The waiters in the
hotel were also friendly. They were served with vermicelli noodles with grilled pork. The food
was extremely enjoyable.
Early the following day, Douglas decided to take a walk around the Ly Son Island after
learning about him from his chopper cyclist. However, the place was not as fascinating as he
thought it could be. Everywhere looked messy, solid waste was pilling along the roads stretching
far away as his eyes could manage. The smell in the island was as foul as that of rotten eggs. As
Douglas was walking along, he decided to take a narrow path that was winding round some
storey building hotels; he got to a place which completely made him nauseated. It was like the
entire city was using the place as a toilet. There was a human waste all over which was stretching
all the way to what looked like a makeshift toilet made of cartons. He could see some of the
waste floating in a pool of water that was in a fishpond that almost fifty meters ahead of
Douglas. The place smelled more than rotten eggs. There were even rotting items thrown there.
Douglas could not hold himself, and he began vomiting.
“Why are there no dustbins in this area?” Douglas asked his driver the next day as they
were resting on some seats that were beside the hotel James had booked a room in. Gregory told
him that most of the people were not educated in the area and thus they saw no need to have
some dustbins. Just as they were talking, a bag full of Kitchen waste fell beside them. From the
look of the situation, it was like someone threw it from a window in the nearby five star hotel
building. Douglas preferred going back to his house and rest. He opted to spend the rest of the
day in his room.

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The next day his driver arrived as usual, immediately after breakfast, they decided to
revisit the sea line. On their way, they met a group of people who were discharging tonnes of
domestic waste directly into the environment. They seemed not to be bothered by what they were
doing. One could notice how comfortable they were mistreating nature from the smile on their
faces. You could not walk even for ten meters without seeing a hip of rotting food trashes.
Solid waste was pilling along the seven-kilometre sea wall. Douglas could not breathe
smoothly. He was not used to that foul smell back in the states. However, what caught him by
surprise was the fact that Lucy and James were all breathing normally everything was okay.
Lucy told him that the plant could only burn a maximum of ten percent of the wastes that the
residents produced. As Lucy was talking, Douglas was covering his nose due to the smell that
was coming from the nearby rotting heap of solid waste. Just as she finished talking, a lorry full
of waste stopped right in front of them. A group of men who were aboard the lorry begun
emptying what seemed like some waste from a toilet due to the nature of the smell that was
coming from it. Douglas approached the lorry to know what the content that it was carrying was;
it was at this time that he got to understand that it was content from a municipal toilet from the
nearby city that was being dumped right into the sea. One could understand how painful that act
was to Douglas from the look of the face. Douglas and his friends kept moving upwards along
the sea line; it was evident that people in that area had long forgotten about taking care of the
environment. As they were walking, they had to hop like grasshoppers due to rotting carcasses of
different animals like dogs and other animals which Douglas never knew what they were that
had been dumped close to the water.“I am shocked by the condition of this area. I have never
thought people could be this heartless to the environment. This is harmful even to the health of

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the people around here.” Douglas exclaimed as they walked along a smelly deserted road that
was heading back to the city.
…THE END…
Reflexive essay
“The Holiday” is an imaginative short story written based on the studied literacy theory
referred to as ecocriticism in short. The character of Douglas the lawyer was inspired by the
characters in the movie “Suits”. The characters in the movie are very likable and realistic. This
made me to extremely like the movie a factor which helped me to create the Character Douglas,
a young educated lawyer who despite his social class, interacts with other people elegantly.
For the last few years, Ecocriticism has grown from its past incarnation as a preserve of
writing nature enthusiasts that were under-theorised to the present vibrant condition which is a
sophisticated array of globe centred formulas to cultural criticism which mobilises and
restructure theories drawn from several disciplines such as philosophy, biology, ecology and
sociology. The diversity of ecocriticism extends to engage with a variety of literary forms as well
as increasingly films and digital environments and music (Vincent, 2018). The central concern of
the ecocriticism theory is that currently, human beings are living at a time when the ecosystem is
under serious concern, and thus there is need to reassess with extreme urgency the relationship
between human and the environment. I wrote the story “The Holiday” with a desire to investigate
the relationship between the natural world in literature and the residents of the Ly Son Island.

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The fiction scrutinised how the environmental issues, the cultural issues that affect the
environment as well as the attitude of the residents of the island to nature. I was guided by the
island’s occupations perception and reaction towards nature and ecological aspects at the time of
writing this story. I emphasised much on the increased environmental destruction at the Da Nang
city as well as the sea line. I tried to freshly analyse and interpret new approaches to the field of
literary as well as theoretical studies.
I represented nature in the story. The degree in which solid waste has piled up along the
sea line was clearly described. I also showed how people had changed the environment through
dumping of human waste, garbage as well as animal carcasses in the environment. Most people
in the Da Nang city lack proper ways of dumping their kitchen waste. The story shows that some
of the individuals go to the extent of throwing kitchen waste from their kitchen windows to land
wherever they shall. As the story shows, the sweet and elegant shape of the once tourist
attraction beach has completely turned into a foul-smelling heap of rotting waste and carcasses.
There is a strong relationship between the physical environment and society in this fiction. The
society determines if the environment maintains the beautiful and elegant look that our creator
gave to it or it will lose it (Nordin & Nurs, 2017). This perception guided me strongly to create
the story. Da Nang city has lost its elegant look. Littre is dumped everywhere. The sweet smell
that Mother Nature gives has faded away. Douglas could not breathe smoothly. A foul smell
occupies the whole city due to solid waste. The sea line has been occupied by waste. The cool
breeze that once came from the smell has gone. Littre is everywhere.

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The globe is the homeland of human beings. This perception guided me in setting the
novel. In the novel, I showed how poor management decisions concerning usage of the planet's
resources had affected the environment. The residents of Ly Son Island have not appreciated the
environment as their source of livelihood. In this story, Douglas tends to understand that
different people have different connectivity to their land. He wonders how the people in the city
have been so careless to treat nature in such an inhuman way while where he came from people
were very keen in preserving the environment. The degree to which physical and human systems
have changed the surface of the once beautiful environment was the major guide in framing this
story. People on the island had taken away the beautiful look of the island. Throughout this
novel, I believed that there was a strong relationship between human culture and the physical
world.
I narrated the story elegantly employing some semiotics. Technical voices were made in a
view to producing the mood of the narrative in the stories verbal representation (Muhamad,
2014). Distancing and other effects were employed in the story to create the happy mood that the
main character was after winning the tough case. These effects were meant to govern the
information that the narrative has to provide to its readers. The narrative is all telling in that it
attains no more than just the illusion of showing through making the fiction alive and real.
This narrative does not imitate the fact no matter how realistic it looks like. I narrated it
as just a fictional act of language that arose from a narrative instance. There is no place for
imitation in the narrative “The Holiday.” I simply employed varying degrees of telling and
showing leaving a limited room for the narrative to act. I constantly availed myself across the
narrative as there is no simple case where I was absent as the narrator.

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Environment and literature can be studied from an interdisciplinary view through the
Ecocriticism theory (Fenn, 2015). In this narrative, I analyzed the texts that illustrate
environmental concerns. I also demonstrated how literature treats the subject nature. I also
brainstormed some possible mitigation for the mitigation of the contemporary environmental
solution in Ly Son Island.
I narrated this fiction using several narrative techniques that helped me convey my
message. These strategies helped me to make my story relay the data to the readers and more
importantly, the styles helped me to make the story complete, interesting and complicated
(Hynes, 2014). To begin with, I applied imagery to develop my story. Readers can build mental
images of several scenes in aid of the descriptive messages that I used for example, “Is there any
vacant room?” Douglas asked the receptionist who was busy perusing the booking books. I
elegantly described the main character using various descriptive words which implied him as a
rich man thanks to his expensive lifestyle. Regarding this, Douglas freely agreed to book the
hotel room which was overpriced.
Conclusion
Fictions can be composed of non-factual prose texts studied on ecocriticism. An
imaginative story is always produced as a story meant to entertain or convey a message to its
readers. It is true that writing short imaginative stories is not as hard as it seems if only one
follows the set rules for writing stories. The story “The Holiday” was elegantly developed but
not described. I was inspired by a character from a movie, but I remade the story. Employing

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semiotics and narrative techniques helped me to develop the narrative. It is indeed true that
fiction writing is simple and easy.
References
Fenn, D. V. (2015). Roots of Ecocriticism: An Exploration of the History of Ecocriticism, A
Literary Theory of the Post- Modern World. Journal of English Language and Literature
(JOELL), 114-119.
Hynes, P. J. (2014). Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques. The Teaching
Company, 1-186.
Muhamad, G. S. (2014). A Semiotic Analysis of The Video Music: “Indonesia Bangkit”:
Comparing Audience Interpretation. Humanities and Social Sciences, 148-156.
Nordin, S., & Nurs, A. J. (2017). The Association Between the Physical envoronment and the
Wellbeing of Older People in Residential Care Fascilities: A Multilevel Analysis.
Pubmed, Online. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28586513/

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Vincent, S. (2018). An Eco-Critical Analysis of Climate Change and the Unthinkable in Amitav
Ghosh's Fiction and Non-Fiction. Humanities, Online. Retrieved from
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/2/59