Lil

As we finish our discussion of Invisible Man  I wanted to write about one of my favorite chapters in the book - Chapter Three, the Golden Day chapter. As chaotic as it is, I love the idea of the Golden Day; it's an isolated part of society where ordinary social norms and hierarchies don't apply. As soon as Mr. Norton walks in, he is ridiculed and mocked by the patients. They call him Thomas Jefferson and John D. Rockefeller and make other jokes that importantly, are at his expense. We talked a lot in class about how important laughter and humor are in Invisible Man - they function most often as a means of undermining someone's authority or importance. Specifically, the jokes that compare Mr. Norton to any other white guy are powerful because they basically send the message that Mr. Norton is of little importance or concern to the patients. He might as well be any other person and in that sense the patients' jokes really serve as the first warning that something is diffe...

One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is the narrator's development from the submissive, naïve kid he was at the beginning of the book to where he is now. We talked in class about whether or not he has truly discovered invisibility, or if he’s still being “kept running” by someone or something and I honestly don’t think there’s one right answer. On the one hand, I think he genuinely seems to have developed more of a consciousness and one scene where this is evident is the one where he talks to Hambro about the Brotherhood’s real intentions. When he’s told that they are basically abandoning Harlem, the narrator gets genuinely upset in a way that suggests a deeper consciousness, at least compared to the beginning of the book. He questions Hambro – he asks why. Why does it have to be Harlem that they’re “sacrificing?” One line that stood out to me was, after Hambro says “It’s inevitable that some must make greater sacrifices than others…” and the narrator replies, “That ‘som...

We’ve mentioned the ‘yam scene’ a few times in class, but we haven’t quite gotten to it yet so it’s pretty much uncharted territory for the moment. I think it’s a super important scene for a lot of reasons, but the most important one is the sense of freedom that the yams bring the narrator. He leaves Mary’s house needing a breath of fresh air and a break from his inner turmoil, and the yams end up bringing him a huge deal of clarification. He says immediately after eating the yams that he is “overcome by an intense feeling of freedom” and I don’t think that he’s truly experienced this feeling yet in the book (pg 264). I was definitely a little confused at first – that eating yams from the street can inspire an inner revelation in someone seems pretty weird – but then I thought about all the times that I’ve gone somewhere on my own, or bought something on my own and I understood a little better. Being in a situation where you answer entirely to yourself and everything you do is on ...

I guess I should have seen it coming since Mr. Mitchell warned us multiple times about the dialogue that happens between the books, but reading Native Son and Invisible Man back to back has really been a wild experience. One comparison which blew my mind just a little just because of how painfully specific it was, was the similarity that we talked about today during class between the narrator in Invisible Man  and Bigger Thomas. In Chapter 3 specifically, the former is so clearly a reflection of Bigger Thomas that it’s difficult to ignore. He is tasked with driving around a white client who makes him at once uncomfortable and confused. And yet, against his better judgment, he is compelled to stray from his intended course. In doing so he exposes his passenger to a new lifestyle and part of town - something that was certainly not in his job description. But as soon as the ball gets rolling it can’t be stopped, and in parallel with Bigger’s fate, readers get the feeling that ...

Disclaimer - I had no idea what to write about since I don't really have many strong feelings about Libra, so instead this is a response to a certain Paul D'Angelo's bold claim about the rankings of the books we read this semester. Here's mine: 5th place: Course Packet Readings I'd have to agree here and say that the packet readings were probably the least enjoyable. I did appreciate them because of the context that they gave for the rest of the semester, but they were also just super dense and hard to read, and they had no plot to make me actively  want  to understand them. Tied for 4th place: Libra and Slaughterhouse 5 I know this is kind of cheating, but I genuinely can't decide between the two. I'm not sure that I would use the word indifferent, because even though it's meant to be neutral I feel like it has some negative connotations to it, but I definitely didn't have very strong opinions on either of the books. I found both interes...

One thing that we've been talking about a lot during class is the way in which  Libra  depicts our obssession  patterns. We are constantly looking for patterns in the information that is given to us, despite whether or not there is even a pattern to be found. I liked the way that Mr. Mitchell put it today - he said it's like the way that we impose constellations on random collections of stars. Are stars really meant to look like frying pans? Probably not, but we're always trying to find something familiar in things that we don't understand, or things that are bigger than us. Can you give me one other reason for the existence of math?? Because god knows it makes no sense, we just pretend it does so we can explain all the other things that make no sense (ironic that we explain confusing phenomena with even more confusing formulas !!). We've talked about how the event which Libra  is centered around - the assassination of JFK - is a shining example of this aspect of ...

When I started reading Kindred, I was really struck by its resemblance to Slaughterhouse. In terms of their structures and overall premises, the two books are super similar.         Both start with some form of foreshadowing which gives us a look into the very end of the book. The functions of these prologues are super similar in that both of them grab the reader's interest and leave them wanting to more. The prologues are both narrated by survivors of whatever is to come. Right off the bat, in Kindred's prologue, readers know that whatever happens to Dana, she will survive, but she will also suffer from it, both physically and mentally. In a similar vein, Slaughterhouse-Five's prologue establishes the fact that the narrator has survived the tale he is about to tell.         We discussed in class how part of the significance of Kindred's prologue is the fact that it establishes the normalcy of the situation. In the hospital, Dana and Kevin disc...