THE UNITED STATES OF FRAMERICA

Cliffs of Dover

2009-04-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

Dover Beach is a poem that is to be presented as a dramatic monologue. It is divided into four distinct thematic sections, each of which uses the previous stanza to build its own message. The first stanza is the first section, of course. This stanza describes the scene that the speaker sees, but offers little deeper meaning. It simply describes first of the farthest images (“the French coast”) and last the closest images (“the pebbles which the waves draw back”). This section does little more than paint pictures in the readers’ minds with use of connotative language, and it is not until the very last two lines (“bring the eternal note of sadness in”) that we can posit the presences of a deeper significance behind Arnold’s words. This contrast becomes the key to the poem.

Once the speaker has described the physical world that his eyes see, the poem moves to what is inside the speaker’s mind. The flow of description comes closer and closer to the speaker’s core. The second stanzas reference to Sophocles suggests the speaker’s inner musings about the sound of the sea and the history and ramifications of this sound.

The third section builds upon the image of Sophocles by showing that is was not just long-dead Sophocles who was aware of the melancholy truth of the sea, but also the reader. The sound of the sea and his musings over Sophocles lead him to realize that yes, indeed, the scene before him is not beautiful and peaceful, but sad and painful. The image of the night-time beach comes to represent a dreary, lonely, pointless existence. The perpetual beating of the waves of the beach makes man’s short existence seem inconsequential.

The fourth section of the poem contains the true point of the poem: that love is the only thing that gives life meaning. In lines thirty-one through thirty-three, the speaker pronounces that the world only seems like a nice place, but in fact offers up none of the comforts that humans seek: joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help for pain. Arnold emphasizes the world’s lack of these qualities by repetition of the word “nor” in line 34. The speaker is imploring his lover (the supposed audience of the poem) to continue loving him as he loves her, for with a lack of their mutual love, life is unlivable.

The view presented at the end of the poem seems to clash with the image set out in the first stanza of the poem. The poem opens up with an idyllic and romantic description of Dover Beach and, by extension, the beauty of the world; however, it ends with the succinct observation that the world sucks and the people that live it in whom you actually care about are the only reason to continue living. This could possibly be considered a love poem, but the overall tone of the verses is one of sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, and loss of faith.

The first stanza of the poem suggests a sonnet. It is divided into an octave, then a sestet with a turn at line nine. The rhyme scheme is not correct though, nor is the meter, and the tone of the poem is not that of a typical sonnet, but Arnold’s intent to create the initial feeling of a romantic poem is unmistakable. But then the poem dives straight into melancholic images mixed with classical allusions to “Sophocles” and “ignorant armies.” The poem’s tone slowly changes from peacefully romantic to sad and melancholic, but seems to switch back to romanticism at the top of the fourth stanza (“Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” line 29) but this is yet another set up for a depressing observation that the world seems nice but is actually just cold and unfeeling and unsympathetic to human feelings.

The last stanza’s assertion of the world’s disappointments is anti-romantic. Instead of glorifying nature’s beauty and expounding on its enthralling abilities, Arnold tells us that humans may find no solace in the natural world, for it is an immortal, unfeeling machine which has not changed since the time of Sophocles.

The poem is designed to trick up the reader. The introduction makes the permanence of nature seem as though it were one of its comforting aspects, but by the end of the poem we learn that it’s permanence is exactly what makes it unfeeling and uncomforting. Love is what human’s really need, for is it human and sympathetic. Arnold is essentially criticizing the human condition.(776)

Tender is the Night, and Haply the Queen Moon is On Her Throne

2009-04-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

I have chosen to write about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. I was originally drawn to it because of how much I enjoyed Great Gatsby, and although the tone of Tender is the Night is vastly different, I enjoyed it for many of the same reasons.

As of now, I have completed reading the book, but will continue to re-read sections that are relevant to my paper’s topic. The topic of my paper will be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s view on the American Dream and how the events of his life led to his disillusionment with the whole idea of this American ideal. Since the book is largely autobiographical, I will compare sections of the book which relate the disillusionment with the ideas of material success and love to happenings in Fitzgerald’s life that perhaps altered his view on such topics.

I am a few pages into my preliminary draft at the moment, and I feel that I am making good progress towards attaining an excellent argument for my thesis.

PS, my apologies for the belatedness of this posting.

The One Real Discussion We Had

2009-03-08T19:38:00.001-07:00

Success. The idea of success has been the main topic of our class's discussion relating to "Death of a Salesman" this week. Therefore, I have no real option but to blog on the idea of success.

In the play, Willy Loman is the catalyst for our discussion of success. He lived his life as a salesman, and probably a mediocre one at that, and is now at a point where he is no longer effective at the job he has chosen and can no longer make a living as a salesman. He is old. He is washed-up. He is fired. At this point, the reader cannot help but see Willy's life as a failure--the opposite of success. But even were Willy a less awful salesperson, his impossible ideal of a successful salesman would prevent him from achieving any sort of satisfaction from his job. He sees success as a salesman as the adoration of every buyer and seller that one ever comes into contact with. He sees success as popularity and memory after death. But the fact is that even a good salesman is not going to be particularly popular nor his death mourned by many.

So there it is. Willy could not achieve success even were he competent due to his high standard for success. This brings into the discussion the relativity of success. Success is completely subjective, so whether or not one acheives it is an entirely personal phenomenon; however, we can posit that one constant in the achievation of success is satisfaction. That is really the important part of success: achieving satisfaction.

Once again, satisfaction is a completely personal condition, and what each person needs to gain satisfaction is completely different. But we can be one-hundred percent sure that with success comes satisfaction, although perhaps satisfaction can come without success.

So what we can conclude is that success cannot be easily defined as making a certain amount of money, or befriending a certain number of people, or anything along those lines: success can be defined as the completion of life goals that is rewarded with personal, lasting satisfaction.

Freedom or Death

2009-02-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

One of the underlying themes and meanings of Ibsen’s play is Nora’s search for freedom. Not the sort of freedom granted to her by a national authority, not the sort of freedom that the greatest country on earth, America, grants to its citizens, but freedom from her worries and responsibilities. Worries and responsibilities that do not come from her role as a woman in the household—she doesn’t even raise her own children—but rather worries and responsibilities that she has set upon herself by forging her father’s signature and illegally borrowing money from a less-than-beneficent moneylender, Krogstad.

Throughout most of “The Doll House,” Nora feels that if she can simply pay off the money she owes to Krogstad, her problems will simply disappear. What she does not realize, however, is that the money she owes is not the source of her problems, but rather to whom she owes to money. Krogstad uses Nora’s debt as a way to ruin her. When Krogstad is fired, he gains revenge on Torvald by revealing the truth about Nora’s past activities, thus ruining Nora’s life, and by extension Torvalds.

But by the time Krogstad ruins Nora and Torvald, Nora has already realized that she cannot gain personal freedom by paying back the money. At this point she has even realized that it is not the blackmail power that Krogstad held over her that prevented her from being free to live her life. She has realized that it was her relationship with her husband that was her biggest impediment to living a life free from worry and meaningless responsibilities. She no longer wants to be a “little squirrel” or any other diminutive form of cute animal: she had been treated like that her whole life.

Nora’s father treated her like a dumb kitten, and Nora’s husband treated her like a dumb kitten. The blackmail situation with Krogstad only served as a catalyst for her to realize that she wanted to be free from her persona as an empty headed girl. The threat of her husband leaving her and divorcing her due to her actions led her to consider a life without her husband. Were Nora to lose her husband, she would, for the first time in her life, not be associated with a dominating, condescending male figure.

At the final scene, Nora gains the strength to say that for once in her life, she will “make sense of [her]self and everything around her.” She leaves Torvald to pursue her own destiny for the first time in her life. The divorce from her husband means a divorce from her entire life as a “little spendthrift” and a start to a new life as her own person.

Hamlet's Sanity

2009-02-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

Hamlet's sanity became a question for me when I realized that he was going to change the course of his actions and of his life based on a conversation he had with a ghost. On top of that, Hamlet's patterns of behavior indicate that he has some sort of mental disturbance.

Hamlet himself puts up a mask of insanity in order to achieve tactical ends, something he he himself admits. Polonius, too, hypothesizes that Hamlet's apparent mental problems are a self-aware ruse that he is using to further himself towards his ultimate end, revenge for his father's death.

Furthermore, Hamlet has undergone severe mental trauma. The death of his father and the discovery that his mother remarried his father's brother. Additionally, he learns that his uncle actually poisoned his father in order to kill him and marry Hamlet's mother in order to gain a powerful position in the Danish kingdom. Ergo, Hamlet is suffering from not only grief due to the death of his fathers, but also anger and hatred towards his uncle whom he must destroy.

However, while at the beginning of the play, the only person who comes into contact with the ghost in Hamlet, later in the play, Horatio too hears the ghost. This validates Hamlet's contact with the ghost as an actual event and not just a hallucination.

It is interesting to consider that idea that the main character of a Shakespeare play may possibly be insane. Since the play is centered around Hamlet, if he was insane, would the audience be seeing the story through the lens of a madman, or would the audience be able to tell the difference between the rumination of a madman and the actual events that occur? Such a play would be reminiscent of the sections of The Sound and the Fury which are told from Benjy's perspective. This is also an amusing connection because Faulkner named the novel after a Shakespeare quote!

In the end though, when all of the evidence is collected and compiled and analyzed, we must conclude that Hamlet is perfectly sane.

Oedipus Complexity

2009-01-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that Oedipus’s fate has been predicated, one may argue that his downfall is actually a result of his own actions. One may also argue that the prophecy of Oedipus’s downfall was a self-fulfilling one, since Oedipus was indeed aware of the prophecy and changed his actions because of it. It can be argued that had Oedipus not been aware of the prophecy, he would not have followed it through.
Oedipus seems, at the beginning, to be an upstanding member of Greek society. He is well respected and well placed socially. This sets him up for his tragic fall. In order for Oedipus to be considering a tragic hero, he must start out as a person of renown and importance so that his tragic fall is pronounced enough that the audience can actually care about it. His tragic flaw becomes apparent quickly in this play. As in most Greek tragedies, or really just Greek stories in general, the heroes tragic flaw is overconfidence: hubris. Hubris brings the downfall of almost all Greek mythological characters.
Think, for example of Icarus, who was so confident that in his waxen wings that he flew too close to the sun and drown in the sea when his wings melted. Or perhaps think of Niobe who boasted that she was better than the goddess Leto because she had born seven times more children than her. She was punished for her hubris by the death of her offspring.
Oedipus too, is brought down by his own hubris. He is so confident in his leadership that he does too little to help the plague-stricken populous of his city, Thebes. He also rejects the negative predictions from Tiresias as treason and accepts the assurances from Jocaste that prophecies do not come true.
By accusing a prophet of the gods and embracing another who rejects those deities, Oedipus is essentially rejecting the gods. Rejection of the gods is the most blasphemous and damning form of hubris, but it is also the most common and hardest to avoid, especially for mortals who live their lives well without interference or blessings from the unseen deities.
It is easy to forget or ignore the gods, but in Greek myth, the gods are very active, very watchful, and very sensitive to being forgotten or ignored. By rejecting the god’s, Oedipus seals his own fate and fulfills the prophecy; therefore, he initiates his downfall.

How do you Keep Warm in Russia?

2009-01-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

Many aspects of the structure and story of The Death of Ivan Ilych are designed as to easily allow the author to comment effectively and profoundly on the position of Ivan in his culture, how he is thought of by his acquaintances, and even on Russian society on a whole. Tolstoy opens the story of The Death of Ivan Ilych with Ivan’s funeral specifically for this purpose. This entry will focus on the use of the funeral as a way for Tolstoy to characterize Ivan.
All of descriptions of the people and the reactions of the people who attend the funeral focus around their lack of connection to Ivan. This trend shows the reader that Ivan has failed to—or was unable to—create meaningful personal relationships in his life. Even his wife, the person whom the reader would most expect to be seriously affected by Ivan’s death, only cries because she feels as though it is the expectation of society for her to do so. The only person who actually sheds true tears is Ivan’s son, who has retained the true feeling and sympathy of a child. His empathetic psyche has not yet been iced over by the unfeeling, unfriendly formality of Russian culture. Those, such as Gerasim, who are actually sad about Ivan’s passing, don’t even really lament his death. They just accept it and move on.
This whole scenario indicates that Ivan cannot form personal relationships. He reduces things, such as his marriage, to equations. He treats his personal life as if it were a business. Tolstoy suggest Ivan’s dealing with his life and personal relationships this way is a symptom of having to deal with life in Russian society. The coldness of the culture and the people mean that people, such as Ivan, must themselves become cold. Ivan’s personal lack of meaningful personal relationships is of course his own fault, but he is a product of a society that produces people such as him.

Interesting Parallels

2008-12-07T12:24:00.001-08:00

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians contain, at the center of their thematic material, an essentially very similar message. That message is one of a solitary man who departs from what his culture or society views as right. Both Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians “regress” into “less civilized” patterns of behavior that are looked-down upon by the establishment, and both are punished for it. They sympathize with the native populations—the Africans for Kurtz and the barbarians for the Magistrate—and are seen as “going native” and rejecting the positive aspects of their respective society’s.
Both the magistrate and Kurtz are relatively important members of their cultures. They do not represent an opposition to their “empires,” but rather are integrally a part of them. The Magistrate realizes this, when he says on page 135 of Coetzee’s novel, “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy…” Whether or not the actions of the magistrate and Kurtz are viewed as a betrayal of their cultures or not is subjective, but what is certain is that they, according to John W. Griffith, chose “the path of assimilation” into the native population that they live among and their actions are “synonymous with degeneracy and demoralization.”
An easily quantifiable quality that the main characters of the both of these novels pick up as they “assimilate” (or “go native” or however you want to call it) is the having of a native woman as a mistress. Kurtz has one, the magistrate has one. These women act as a human, feminine connection between these exploratory and investigative men and the native, local cultures in which they have such an interest.
The most interesting connection between the Magistrate and Kurtz is their importance to their respective empires even after their regression. It doesn’t particularly matter that Kurtz has gone mad way upriver as long as he continues to send down ivory. And when the magistrate’s relatively harmless interest in the barbarians is replaced with Colonel Joll’s repression. In both novels, everything was going essentially just fine—well, not so much for Kurtz by our standards, but he was doing okay by his—until someone comes along and interferes with what the “regressed” men we’re going about their business on.
Even though Waiting for the Barbarians and Heart of Darkness were written by different authors in different places in different centuries, many of the thematic issues that the novels bring up overlap and parallel each other. Perhaps this is because the presence of colonials and their contact with the native population is an issue that has been dealt with worldwide for hundreds of years.

Impressions

2008-11-25T10:20:00.000-08:00

Waiting for the Barbarians initially impressed me for one specific reason. It was the not the plot or the characters or the themes that struck me, but the setting. The idea of a completely fictional setting reminds me of space opera-style sci-fi or high fantasy, but the nearly complete realism of the frontier of an unnamed empire lends elements of a historical novel. The overall effect is that of a hard fantasy (i.e. ultra-realistic and magic-free) novel.
But despite the “fictional” setting, it seems to me to be almost exactly like the Roman frontier in Britannia. Sure, the technology is different than that of the Romans, as are some cultural aspects, but the underlying concept is the same: a remote, cold settlement of an Empire that is mostly administered from a single far-away city. The Magistrate is a typical late-Roman Empire administrator: so far away from the central city that he does what he wants in a slightly eccentric manner without any fear of repercussions, even though his policies do not necessarily reflect the policies of the “Empire” as a whole.
The style of the magistrate’s narration is a major aspect of the feel of the novel. The magistrate sees a somewhat quixotic view of the barbarians that surround his settlement. He does not like to look at their downsides, and instead maintains a respectful fascination with them. His archeological expeditions and policies that are aimed at protecting the “innocence” (i.e. un-civilized-ness) of the barbarians reflect his respect for their culture. He sees them from almost an ivory tower. The soldiers and average people that deal with barbarians see them and dirty and uncivilized, but the magistrate chooses to see them as “noble savages.”
The really interesting part of this novel is it’s aspect as an allegory of a “real” Empire, despite it’s obvious similarity to that of the Roman Empire, especially during the late Empire during the reign of Hadrian.

Comments on "'To Boldly Go': Heart of Darkness and Popular Culture" by Linda J. Dryden

2008-11-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

--As we progress into the modern world, Heart of Darkness acquires new relevance beyond the Belgian Congo. This essay focuses on “the variery of ways that Heart of Darkness has been used in our popular culture.”

--Apocalypse Now “recontextualizes” Heart of Darkness as a film about Vietnam. Kurtz’s last word in both of these works in “The horror! The horror!” Both of these works leave the real meaning behind these words somewhat ambiguous.

--Is Conrad’s work influential because of itself, or because of its second birth through Apocalypse Now?

--The Simpsons references it in “Bart of Darkness” and “Kamp Krusty” although the latter is a reference to Lord of the Flies, which is a reference to the Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne, which is a reference to Heart of Darkness. “Again, we have come full circle: postmodern intertextuality infiltrates popular culture at every turn,” says the essay.

--Heart of Darnkess’s ability to be used as a pop culture reference signals is impact of our entire culture

--Star Trek has been influenced by Conrad. Marlow says “what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity” (36) when referencing the natives; Star Trek frequently uses cultural and racial differences to ask what constitutes humanity.

--Much like the African who “hoisted his weapon on his shoulder with alacrity”(16),
Data, the android in The Next Generation, is used to comment on human behavior.

--This essay focuses heavily on “intertextuality”—how referencing something that references something else is like referencing that something else.

--Heart of Darkness is apparently one of the most frequently quoted texts in pop culture and media. It has become an integral part of more than just pop culture, but our “cultural heritage”

Cyclicality in the Conclusion

2008-11-03T18:12:00.000-08:00

The Sound and the Fury resolves itself at the end as being cyclical. It comes around cyclically both in the way the narrative is presented, and also in the actual plot of the story. In terms of the way the narrative is presented, the re-hash of Benjy’s visiting of the cemetery in which the older Quentin is buried brings the various narrative perspectives around full circle. We see his visit to the cemetery in the carriage at the beginning of the story from his own warped perspective, then at the end from Faulkner’s omniscient one. The loss of the first Quentin by his own hand is similar to the loss of the young Quentin, who too made a conscious decision to depart the Compson family, if not by the same means. Young Quentin’s departure brings the story around in another way. Much as Caddy, Quentin’s mother, was banished for her egregious promiscuity, so too was Quentin, if not in such an official manner, by the harsh, unloving atmosphere that the Compson household provides under the grip of Jason. Therefore the novel resolves itself cyclically in three connected rotations. The re-hash of Benjy’s visit to Quentin’s grave brings us to the failures of both old Quentin and young Quentin, which brings us to the departures of both Quentin and Caddy. (224)

Images in The Sound and the Fury

2008-10-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

Bass, Eben. “Meaningful Images in The Sound and the Fury.” Modern Language Notes 76.8 (1961): 728-731.

Bass’s article focuses specifically on a few objects in The Sound and the Fury that hold especially special significance to characters in the story. A particularly interesting symbol which Bass focused on was Caddy’s slipper, which Benjy insists on holding on to throughout the chronologically later parts of the novel. Bass notices that “since Quentin the niece objects to the idiot’s fondling it, dirty as it is, during mealtime, we may judge her dislike for her mother” (Bass 729).

The slipper is essentially presented as a symbol of Caddy’s and eventually Quentin’s downfalls. The slipper is Caddy’s wedding slipper. What else could a “white satin slipper” (Faulkner 332) be for? When Quentin sees the slipper, she associates it with hatred and negative feelings for her mother. Benjy, on the other hand, needs it, for it is one of the few remaining meaningful memories he has of his beloved sister. Caddy is not just a disgrace for Quentin—as it is a symbol of Quentin’s now-dysfunctional childhood with the Compsons—but a symbol of disgrace for the entire Compson family. The especially damning aspect of it is the fact that it is the slipper likely worn by Caddy to her wedding to Herbert—the wedding that preceded a marriage doomed to fail as a result of Caddy’s promiscuity.

We learn that Ms. Compson has officially edicted that the name “Caddy” not be spoken in the Compson household. Benjy, though, needs some way to hang on to memories of his long-gone sister. No one else in the house likes to think about her, but Benjy needs to. Caddy was the only person in his life to really show him true affection. He needs to hold on to the slipper to hold on to his memories of happier times. For the rest of the family, especially Quentin, the constant presence of this slipper in the house is a haunting reminder of Caddy’s fate.

Since Quentin is the reason that Caddy’s marriage didn’t work, the presence of Caddy’s wedding slipper causes tension. Its constant presence and Quentin’s dislike for it foreshadow the parallels between Caddy’s and Quentin’s illicit affairs and eventual downfalls. There is a reason that Faulkner waits until nearer to the end of the novel to unveil that “the slipper that consoles Benjy is reavealed as Caddy’s wedding slipper only when the daughter whose birth wrecked that marriage turns out badly herself” (Bass 729-730).

Bass points out that the slipper, along with other images such as the pear tree on the Compson’s property, and the mirror and the fire in the Compson’s library, serve to “unite whole segments of the novel” (Bass 731). The fact that Faulkner hides and obscures the perspicuity of such images actually lends to their strength. By allowing the reader to subconsciously add meaning to these images him- or herself, the images actually become stronger, as the reader views the objects in a manner far more similar to the way the characters in the story do than if Faulkner were to explain the meanings of the images. (525)

The Narratorial Perspective of Benjy

2008-10-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

The narratorial perspective of the first section of the story offers the reader an in-depth view into the life of the severely handicapped Benjy. The section is presented in a “stream of consciousness” style in which the reader is subjected to constant flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, and flash-forwards. The reader is allowed very little help in determining what year, month, and day the events in which the flashbacks take place. Instead, the reader must use context clues (such as the presence or absence of certain characters) in a given section in order to determine the general timescale of the flashback. Additionally, Benjy “records” events accurately—or at least we have to assume that he does—but he fails to analyze them in any way, often leaving it to the reader to decipher from the text what is actually happening. For the first section of The Sound and the Fury, great responsibility is thrust upon to reader to determine what in the world in going on, mainly because of the odd and severely handicapped style of narration that Benjy provides.

Firstly, we will deal with Benji’s accurate recording of events, but inability to understand them. For example, when Quentin catches Benjy drunk in the barn with T.P., he forces Benjy to drink something. He says “It was hot on my chin and on my shirt”(11.1) and that then “It was hot inside me”(11.1) The reader should interpret that Quentin is making Benjy drink coffee—a hot beverage that was believed to ameliorate drunkenness—but Benjy nevers actually is aware that is it coffee or even of what is happening to him. This type of situation is typical to this section. William Faulkner is almost playing a game with the reader through Benjy, challenging the reader to interpret the events for him- or herself.

Nextly, we will deal with the crafty time changes that Faulkner throws in. We can hypothesize that the reasons the events are so out of order is because Benjy’s mental handicaps prevent him for staying mentally in the present. Since the story is “stream of consciousness” we can assume that Benjy is experiencing the flashbacks with us, as though he is standing dumbly in the present re-living past events as though they are occurring at the moment. Faulkner allows the readers some clues as to when each event is taking place when. The greatest key is the presence of one of Benjy’s caretakers: either T.P., Versh, or Luster. Sections with Versh occur when Benjy is a small child. Sections with T.P. occur when Benjy is teen-aged. Sections with Luster occur when Benjy is an adult and in the novel’s “present.”

Faulkner does a good job presenting the events of the novel from the viewpoint of someone with no concept or time or chronology and who is incapable of interpreting events in any meaningful way. Benjy, acts as a tape recorder: we’re a series of events to be recorded on a tape recorder with no commentary and no real video, it would be possible to determine from the recording what was happening, but not without in depth thought, extensive use of context clues, and a careful attention to the text.

Interior Design: Sadness and Psychosis

2008-09-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a clear-cut story of a woman’s descent from depression to insanity. The story, written as a personal journal by the narrator-protagonist—a woman whose name we never actually learn—details her own descent into madness from her own perspective. It is obvious to the reader by the end of the story that the narrator has gone insane; however, it is also obvious to the reader that the narrator doesn’t know this herself.

The introduction of the story outlines the mental situation of the narrator. The narrator knows from the start that she is not completely sound of mind, but insists that her physician husband “does not believe [she is] sick!” (8). The husband, named John, is convinced that the narrator is simply suffering from a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (9). John constantly prescribes cures for this hysterical tendency, but the efficacy of his cures is questionable at best. The narrator tells in her entries that her husband has her taking “phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and [that he forbids her] to ‘work’ until [she is] well again” (11). It is notable that phosphate is involved in ATP synthesis while phosphites are used in the production of pesticides and adhesive; take whatever meaning you wish from this. The narrator complains that she has “to be so sly about [her writing], or else [she is met] with heavy opposition” (15). The point of this paragraph is to explain that the narrator is suffering from some sort of mental instability and her husband’s actions are doing nothing to help.

The actual “yellow wallpaper” is part of the décor of the upstairs bedroom which the narrator and John choose to sleep in. The relationship between the narrator’s slide into insanity and this “almost revolting” “smoldering unclear yellow” (34) wallpaper is closely intertwined. The descriptions of the wallpaper in the beginning of the story describe it in concrete terms as “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (32). But at the end of the story, the narrator starts seeing a woman in the pattern whom she actually begins to believe is real. Right before the story’s climax, the narrator is in the yellow-papered room by herself, but “really [she isn’t] alone a bit” (216) for she was in the company of the wallpaper woman! The narrator sees the wallpaper woman trying to escape from the design, noting that she “takes hold of the bars” which make up the pattern “and shakes them hard” (188). The narrator does her best to help the wallpaper woman escape, collaborating with her on a solitary night to pull off the wall covering, and “before morning [they] had peeled off yards of that paper” (217). The final manifestation of the narrator’s complete loss of mental capacity comes when she locks her husband out of the room and peels off all of the wallpaper.

A student of psychology may attribute the narrator’s insanity to two different things. Firstly, it is possible that the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression—not farfetched considering the fact that the narrator has a baby (mentioned in paragraph 46)—or maybe even postpartum psychosis, the symptoms of which, according to Wikipedia, include “seeing or hearing things that others don't” (i.e. the woman in the wallpaper), “random or uncontrollable anxiety attacks” (i.e. the narrator’s locking herself in the bedroom), and an “inability to take care of the baby” (i.e. the fact that the baby is hardly mentioned in the narrator’s journal at all). Secondly, the domineering demeanor of the husband may be exacerbating the narrator’s pre-existing mental conditions, but the narrator herself refuses to consciously admit it. The trapped woman in the wall is actually a “Freudian Projection”: the woman trapped behind the bars trying to escape the pattern is actually the narrator’s subconscious realizing her suppressed feelings of repression and constraint by John.

Freudian Projection is theoretically a psychological defense mechanism, which would project the narrator’s negative feelings away from her; however, her mental problems are apparently too great for this alone to work, which indicates that she is indeed suffering from some sort of psychosis. The end of the story, from paragraph 297 or so to the conclusion, outline the final descent into insanity. (724)

The Downsides of Principle-Based Action.

2008-09-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

Mr. John Hoyer Updike’s short story “A&P” is a tale that demonstrates the downsides and dangers of standing up for one’s principles. “A&P”’s narrator, Sammy, quits his job when his boss, Lengel, berates three young, swimsuit-clad ladies who are shopping in the local A&P Food Market. Sammy believes that his quitting will give him not only satisfaction for having stood up to “the man,” but also the affection of the three attractive young ladies whom Lengel scolded, saying that he wanted them to be “decently dressed when they come in[to the A&P]” (16). Unfortunately for Sammy, neither of his beliefs hold up in his post-quit world.

The satisfaction that Sammy gains from standing up to establishment is minimal, partly due to the negative effects doing so will have on his own life, and partially due to the disappointing reaction of Lengel. It almost seems as though Sammy is hoping for Lengel to explode at him when he says that he is quitting; it would make his action that much more satisfying. Instead, Lengel just “sighs and being to look very patient and old and gray” (30). It is right at that moment that Sammy begins to feel regret: he agrees with Lengel that he will feel the ramifications of his quitting “for the rest of [his] life”(30), and he admits that “it’s true” that he doesn’t want to “do this to [his] Mom and Dad” (30). The fact that Sammy has to consciously think to himself that it seems to him that “once you being a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it”(30) indicates the regret that he feels for his actions.

In addition to the regret that Lengel makes Sammy feel, the three girls who incited Sammy to quit do not even see him do so. After his discussion with Lengel, Sammy “look[s] around for [his] girls, but they’re gone, of course” (31). The tone of my previous quotation signifies that Sammy didn’t really expect to impress the girls. He acted on an impulse, and his talk with Lengel made him quickly understand the consequences of such an action. The feelings of regret that Sammy feels at this point naturally set him up for this pessimism.

Although Sammy realizes that he made a mistake when he stood up to Lengel based on misguided principles of chivalry, he does not go back on his decision and grovel to Lengel to get his job back. That is because Sammy has real principles also, chief among them his belief that he once he has done something, he cannot go back on it. He quickly accepts the situation and even finds the positive aspects of it, noting that it was fortunate that the incident should occur during to summer because “there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, [he] just saunter[s] into the electric eye in [his] white shirt that [his] mother ironed out the night before”(30). Although Sammy tries to find the positive aspects of his quitting, he fails, admitting to himself that his “stomach kind of fell as [he] felt how hard the world was going to be for to [him] hereafter” (31). (527)

Disillusionment and Discontent in "Interpreter of Maladies":

2008-09-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

“Interpreter of Maladies” is a story which focuses greatly on the Das family’s cultural and moral distance from their genetic and ethnic background. But the underlying driving force behind the plot movement is Mr. Kapasi’s quixotic belief that despite the Das’s distinctly foreign and very liberal values, he can still connect with Mrs. Das on a romantic level.

In the story’s opening sequences, the tone of the writing indicates mild disapproval for the lifestyle of the Das family, but also focuses heavily on a physical description of Mrs. Das, her hair, and her clothing. Since the story is told from the a third-person narrative view that is limited to Mr. Kapasi’s point of view, one can safely intuit that Mr. Kapasi himself holds mild disapproval for the Das’s and spends quite a lot of mental energy gathering an image of the very attractive Mrs. Das, noting minute details such as her blouse’s “calico appliqué in the shape of a strawberry” (15), which he “found irresistibly becoming” (116).Later, when Mr. Kapasi and the Das family are at the temple, Mr. Kapasi is “pleased especially that it appealed to Mrs. Das”(97) and specifically notes via the narrative her interest in “the topless female musicians”(97) which are carved into the frescoes. Seeing Mrs. Das and the topless figures side by side brings his mind to his own dissatisfaction with his love life.

Mr. Kapasi’s physical attraction to Mrs. Das, along with his own discontentment at home, sets him up to fall for her at the slightest hint that she might be interested in him. And—perhaps predictably—he does. He misconstrues Mrs. Das’s usage of the word “romantic” when she remarks on his job as a medical interpreter, and when Mrs. Das asks for his address so that she might send him pictures, Mr. Kapasi creates in his mind a delusional fantasy of a clandestine, trans-oceanic relationship that he and Mrs. Das may have, in which she “would reveal the disappointment of her marriage, and he his” (89). Throughout the most the “Interpreter of Maladies,” Mr. Kapasi is “anxious to be alone with [Mrs. Das]” (100), so that he might have a chance to pursue his fantastical relationship with her.

But when he finally does get a chance to be alone with her, the secret she confides in him and the reasons behind her sharing that secret shatter any of his hopes that she and he might liaise. Mrs. Das confides in Mr. Kapasi the secret of her emotionally painful extramarital affair with a friend of Mr. Das. Instantly, Mr. Kapasi’s delusional illusions disappear: he realizes that her confiding in him about her sordid past means that she has no romantic interest in him, but instead only a practical interest in his talent as an “interpreter of maladies.” He resolves himself rather quickly, deciding to do his best to interpret her malady by asking the incisive question that a psychologist might ask: “is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?” (162). Mrs. Das glares at him and leaves the car, without responding, indicating to Mr. Kapasi that he was not even important to Mrs. Das as an interpreter of maladies, but as simply a receptacle for the dirty secret of hers which she had grown tired of holding all to herself.

So when boiled down, “Interpreter of Maladies” is a story of disillusionment. Mr. Kapasi’s mental image of his relationship with Mrs. Das was detailed almost to the point where it was real to him. Part of this mentally real fantasy is Mr. Kapasi’s daydream-like belief that Mr. Kapasi feels the same way about him as he does her. When he learns otherwise, his imagined relationship with her shatters instantly, broken in to so many little pieces that he does not even try to hold on to it.(636)

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Story of Evolution and Ascendancy

2008-08-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

The books I have read since June are as follows:

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

And I’m working on Dune by Frank Herbert

Arthur C. Clarkes 2001: A Story of Evolution and Ascendancy

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a book that I have read cover to cover many times. There are very few novels that I wish to re-read, but since 2001 always leaves me with a surreal feeling of vastness, I have come back to it time and again. The fact that it traces the evolution of human beings from the beginning of sentience to the ascendancy to omnipotence makes 2001 a truly epic read.

The beginning of 2001 depicts the moment that humanity’s ape ancestors became sentient. In the opening sequences, a mysterious black monolith appears among a group of ape-like animals. Through mysterious, hypnotic, and alien means, the monolith instills intelligence and self-awareness upon the apes, therefore giving these pre-humans the prerequisites for civilization. After completing its task, the monolith disappears without a trace. The newly sentient apes use their newfound intelligence to fashion weapons and kill an enemy group of primates. The pre-human’s new tools “were simple enough, yet they could change this world and make the man-apes its masters.” This theme of ascendancy to mastery becomes one of the books major themes.

Arthur C. Clarke’s writing starts to shine in the next section of the book. The story skips forwards to a very optimistic version of the year 2001, where humanity has command over space travel and has colonized the moon. The majority of the story takes place on the spaceship Discovery One, which, manned by Dave Bowman, Frank Poole, and a sentient super-computer named HAL 9000. The Discovery One is on a many-month voyage to Saturn’s moon Japetus (Iapetus) in pursuit of a signal sent from another mysterious alien monolith that was found on earth’s moon. HAL eventually malfunctions and by his own cold logic, determines that Dave and Frank are dangerous to the mission. HAL, whose programming has dictated that the success in the mission to Saturn is the most important goal in his “life,” manages to kill Frank, but Dave manages to disconnect this robotic antagonist before he himself is killed. The parallel between HAL’s violence and the violence of the man-apes eons before is clear: with intelligence comes the ability and knowledge to kill for personal gain.

It is at this point in the novel that humans and the precursor alien race which produced the monoliths seem to be at essentially the same evolutionary level. Both races have brought intelligence to a lesser being. The aliens brought intelligence to humans with the monolith, and the humans brought intelligence to computers with their technology. The parallel continues in that both of the newly intelligent creatures immediately turn to violence, whether it be a man-ape killing another with a bone-weapon or a super-computer ejecting a man into space.

We soon learn, however, that in the eons since the monolith “awakened” the man-apes, not only humans, but also the unseen aliens have evolved quite a bit. Upon Dave Bowman’s finally reaching Japetus, another monolith opens up to him, creating a portal to a new surreal world. When Dave comes into contact with the monolith, he proclaims that “the thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — It's full of stars!" This monolith instills into Dave a completely new level of intelligence: omniscience and transcendence from a material body. With his new omniscience, Dave has no inclination towards violence, but is, more importantly, truly the master of the universe, much in the same way that the monolith’s influence made the ape-men the masters of their own universe. The alien race has demonstrated its evolution by its ability to bring a new level of intelligence to humans, far beyond what it was able to do in the beginning of the novel and far beyond what humans were able to do with HAL.

The message here is clear: while humans are constantly evolving and are able to instill intelligence and power upon lesser beings, there are still greater powers out there, constantly evolving themselves. The never-seen aliens which produce the monoliths are a metaphor for any sort of god or greater-being. Arthur C. Clarke is making the message with 2001 that although the power available to humans is always growing, their power will always be insignificant in the incredible vastness of the universe. The amazingly epic and cosmic scale on which 2001 takes place will resonate within me forever.(722)