You can find the reading here:
https://www.browardschools.com/cms/lib/FL01803656/Centricity/Domain/204/THE-GARDEN-PARTY1921.pdf
Please respond to these two comments in one paragraph each (which is about the reading) informal and direct way (like saying: I agree with you…. , that a good answer but I have different opinion than yours which is I think …., what do you mean by …., or any think )
First comment: At the end of “The Garden Party”, Laura says to her brother after seeing the corpse of the working class man, “isn’t life…” These are the only words she can conjecture to describe her feelings about the topic. I think that she was so overcome with many different emotions, that it was incredibly difficult for her to describe what life is in just a few words. She describes the experience at the house as marvelous, even through she was describing seeing the affects of death and despair. Laura is from an upper class family, so she would not normally be exposed to this type of thing. When she is exposed, I think that she sees more than just the bureaucratic functions and aspects of a rich family. It is a lesson that teaches her about grief, humility, and passion. Trying to describe these new experiences to her brother is difficult for her because life is so much more than one or two or three or four etc. things. Her brother understands her mental state after seeing death and how others cope with it, so he simply agrees with her. It would have made her more upset to try to describe what life actually is, and I think that he may have had the same experience in his life at some point as well. He was able to connect & comfort with her, which shows he likely cannot summarize the very complex thing that is life with few descriptive words either.
Second comment: Throughout the story, Laura is constantly trying to “understand” and be one of the common folk, remarking on the workers looks and the joviality and wishing they could be her friends. She is also shown as being “sympathetic” when it comes to the death of the man at her gate, not wanting to continue celebrating even though her neighbors are in mourning. Which is all well and good, but Laura’s perspective is forcibly seen through rose-tinted glasses. Sure, she may want to be their friends, but she doesn’t exercise any effort to actually help them put up the tent. And when her mother basically forces her to take the rest of the sandwiches and cream puffs to the neighbor’s house, since Laura seemingly “cares” about them so much, she back steps on her intentions. She wants to go but she doesn’t, because the severity of the common folk’s world and being surrounded by it makes her feel incredibly uncomfortable.
All of this is to say that the last lines of the story are something of a metaphor for Laura’s revelation on how the world is. She’s seen the death of a common man, and the suffering his wife goes through, yet she has no words for it. She’s spoken in very flowery language throughout the entire story, but the harshness of death has robbed her of all her pretty words. Her failure to convey her proper meaning to her brother and him trying to “fill in the blank” with no answer of any real substance helps to pull the pretty veil of their lifestyle over their eyes again so they can be sheltered from what’s really out there. It’s like an adult patting a kid on the head when they can’t fully understand something, and telling them “you’ll get it when you’re older.” Except that’s not likely to happen with the upper class way of living.