While both the short stories "My First Job" and "The Election" found in Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons are inaccessible online, we can certainly give you general advice about exactly what demons are in these stories and how to find them. In general, the demons actually represent the main themes in the stories. A theme is an underlying concept or a repeated idea within a piece of literature. A theme is not necessarily a moral, but it certainly can be. In general, a theme is a universal idea that the author is trying to convey and make a point about. For example, common themes we see in Charles Dickens would be the effects of poverty, child abuse, and social injustice. Just like Charles Dickens and other authors, Lyda Barry has used the concept of demons to create themes and assert main points . It's also important to note...
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thata demon can be
defined as something that continues to have a mischievous or
negative influence on a person's life. For example, one
person's demon could be alcohol. Hence, the ongoing theme you are looking for
that can be characterized as the demon in the story is the theme that has most
negatively influenced the character in the story. Let's look at the story
titled "Head Lice" as an example.
This story is about a girl who grew up feeling like a social
outcast; her feelings of rejection even continued in her adult life.
Head lice is certainly a recurring motif within the short story, but the
central themes are really more about loneliness,
inferiority, rejection, and acceptance. The girl was rejected in
elementary school, mostly because she had red hair. Her
loneliness then caused her to develop an obsession with bugs,
and her conversations about bugs incited those around her to
reject her even more. It was not until she vacationed in the
Philippines that she finally learned the feeling of being
accepted. She met friends in the Philippines who seemed just
as eccentric as she was and who even obsessed over head lice yet were still
popular. She developed her first crush on a boy who was was very popular and
very intelligent, even liking bugs just like her, as we see in Barry's
passage:
I was falling in love with the kid everyone called The Professor. He was the smartest kid I ever met and he liked bugs.
However, the friends she developed in the Philippines made her feel even
more lonely, rejected, and inferior once back in the states.
As an adult, she finds her first boyfriend, but he is so arrogant and
condescending that he is really just a new form of the same old rejection she
had to face as a child. Hence, we see that it is really her own sense
of inferiority spurned by others' rejection of her that is really
continuing to create the rejection she has to deal with in her
life. Therefore, the real demon in this story, which is
also the dominant theme, is
inferiority.
We can see from this that what you are looking for in your own two
stories is the ongoing theme that also
creates the problems for the characters, and this ongoing
theme will also be the characters' demons.