The Catfish
Casey Ryan
“Never”
Her thin, wavering voice suggested otherwise.
“Under no circumstances would I stoop to such a level”
The way her eyes unconsciously lit up at the proposition hinted to me that she would.
And that was all it took. She would help me undo Douglas- the man who had done me so wrong in years past. We would give him a glimmering vision of love. More of a mirage, truth be told. For much like the bountiful oasis the lost desert traveller sees as his body diminishes and his mind collapses, the companion Douglas would so ardently seek didn’t exist.
She would be an amalgamation of fake accounts and the voice of my sweet helper Justine, who would help me act on my burning desire to decimate Douglas’ faith in love- he had everything, and at my hands his world would turn to dust.
Everything went smoothly, with Douglas growing infatuated with his online lover. He should surely have grown suspicious of her way of avoiding meeting in real life, but still he carried on, oblivious that the one he devoted himself to only existed in the digital realm- a creature made of 1s and 0s on a phone instead of cells in a body.
The agonising anticipation of how I would reveal this truth and enact my revenge kept me up at night. I played every possible scenario over in my head, trying to find the way that would deliver me the most satisfaction. Here was my journey’s end, the final act of my human play.
He entered the room expecting to meet a bubbly young woman who said that she loved him, but instead found me waiting for him, silent. The look on his face was priceless. There is anabstract beauty in watching a man fall apart, something strangely sweet in watching the one I so despise enter a state of black despair at my hands.
I was a true puppeteer, albeit one that controls people instead of inanimate plastic.
Rationale
The Catfish follows the story of a manipulative character who uses fake accounts on social media to trickhis companion Douglas into believing that a real woman who is interested in him is on the other end of their conversation and texts. The main character then reveals this deception to Douglas, devastating him. The text makes use of paragraph structure to control the flow and pace of reading and therefore highlight important phrases and sentences. The short, separate lines help to draw the eye to and greatly increase the impact of important lines in the text. The text also stayed intentionally ambiguous, by leaving some specific details of the events in the text unclear, so the reader can fill in the gaps themselves. The story features limited exposition, as necessary in such in a short text.
The choice to write the story in first person was done to show a different angle of the tale of revenge to Othello, by focusing more on the party seeking revenge than the one being undone. Another important creative choice was to tell a story in a modern setting that would be impossible to tell in Shakespeare’s time. This choice to focus on catfishing- gaining one’s trust through creating fake accounts for either financial gain or sick personal enjoyment- keeps the story fresh and original to bring a new spin on the classic revenge narrative.
This text features similar themes to Shakespeare’s Othello, most notably notions of revenge and manipulation. The unnamed main character is analogous to Iago, in that he manipulates others for his own gain and has an egotistical personality. This is shown in both the opening lines where he convinces a reluctant participant to help him in his plan, and in his final lines, where he likens himself to a puppeteer. These themes are all present in Othello, particularly in scenes like act 3 scene 3, when Iago falsely convinces Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful to him. The text also draws inspiration from the language of Shakespeare. Although the text features the use of a more modern form of English, it emulates the grand similes and metaphors often found in Shakespeare’s work, such as the comparison of the fake online accounts to a desert mirage.