"What is Q?"

Throughout both of the stories "The Aquatic Uncle" and "The Dinosaur" Q shows that he is an anti-social person that ends up being left behind.

In the beginning of the dinosaur story, Q starts out being alone, "I spent many, many years on those deserted plateaus. i had survived... but i was alone."(Pg.97) I feel that this kind of shows how much of a loner he is. He is a dinosaur, an individual within his own race, but his race soon becomes extinct. He had survived all of the attacks, starvation, nature, etc.... but he was alone, he did not survive with anyone else. He either leaves everyone else behind as he escapes the extinction by running away from everything, or he GETS left behind by everyone else as THEY run away from everything. He is kind of a relic of the past, something that some people revere, and something that some people hate, but all in all, he is something that is forgotten by everyone else and has little importance in the real world. He is also left behind by everyone in a spiritual way, because when everyone dies, they leave him behind in the living world as they all advance to the afterlife. They leave him in a world where no one trusts him.

When Q first meets with Fern-Flowers brother, Zahn, the each have a bad first impression of each other. Zahn talks about how “In the plains, our bunch takes turns keeping watch, day and night,. But there we can trust each other; we don’t take in characters we don’t know...”(102) I feel that this quote shows how left out Q is when he talks to other people, and how bad of a first impression he makes on people that he first meets. Right when someone meets him for the first time, he is so different from other people and is so strange, the he is almost always left out. Someone is always disgusted by him and seems to want him gone. An example of that is when the villagers first meet him, and he immediatly earns the nickname, “The Ugly One” because of his looks. He is seperated from the “group” as soon as he arrives. No one seems to really “like” him or want him to stay as soon as he arrives. He leaves the village to “scout” out the enemy, but instead, the village leaves him. And in the end, he has a son, but he leaves him and his “spouse” for a new life somewhere else.

In the Aquatic Uncle story, Q is left out even more. He is a creature that is in the middle of evolutions, and has a reptilian girlfriend/fiancee and a fish-like grandfather.His fiancee loved him and they both loved living on the land, without any intentions to live anywhere else. However, while the story progresses, his fiancee, Lll, seems to drift farther and farther away from him. In the end, Lll ends up leaving him for his great-uncle to live in the sea together. “And with one of those rapid climbs of hers, the last... and let it go in a dive.” (Pg. 81) Lll, was his fiancee, a girl that was about to marry him, a girl that loved him, and a girl that he was supposed to spend the rest of his life with. And yet, she leaves him for his great-uncle, to live a life in the sea. His great-uncle is not even part of the same species as she is, while Q is. He might have just sucked at relating to Lll, but he was most defiantly left behind by her, for a person not even of the same species.