Hi Ho Hi Ho It's Off to Work We Go

Work, in the novel Super Sad True Love Story, means different things to the different characters. In the beginning of the novel for one of the main characters, Lenny, work is a means for survival. On pages 50 and 51, Lenny has a list of his “Strategy for Short-Term Survival and then Immortality Following Return to New York After European Fiasco.” The number one item on this list is “Work Hard for Joshie.” Lenny knows that it is important for him to keep the job that he has if he ever wants to live forever. He views his work as a means to an end.

A second passage that deals with work can be found on pages 59 and 60. This passage talks about Lenny’s coworker Howard Shu and the employees of Post-Human Services in general. Lenny says that there is something sad about the employees and that Howard Shu exemplifies this sadness. Lenny says, “The truth is, we may think of ourselves as the future, but we are not. We are servants and apprentices, not immortal clients” (60). This shows that no matter how much they work or how good they are at their jobs, they are not the ones who are becoming “immortal.” Work can only get Howard Shu so far in life, and will not necessarily help him to live forever.

A final passage that I would like to talk about can be found on pages 228 and 229. In this passage, Eunice and her father volunteer at one of the LNWI camps in Tompkins Square. This shows work in a completely different way than the rest of the novel. It was almost strange to see people volunteering and caring for other people in this very self-promoting society. Seeing Eunice’s father, whom we do not think very highly of at this point, caring for the poor is very refreshing. It is the only time we see work used to help others instead of for personal gain.

To Shock or Not to Shock?

Reading M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang would have been a completely different experience had Hwang kept Song’s true gender a secret. Letting the audience know that Song is really a man makes the audience very critical of Gallimard. Every time Song does a little something to keep Gallimard from finding out he is a man, the audience questions how Gallimard cannot see through the ruse. For example, when Song/Butterfly tells Gallimard that he/she is pregnant I wanted to know how Gallimard could have possibly believed that. In order for Butterfly to be pregnant with his baby they would have had to have sex. They clearly could not have had sex.

If the audience had not known Song was a man, there could have been a much bigger climax to the play. To reveal something like that to an audience that was not expecting it would be huge. Hwang’s choice in not doing this shows that he did not want to shock his audience, but instead make them analyze the relationship between Song and Gallimard. Instead of making the audience gasp in shock he makes the audience cringe at Gallimard’s blindness.

It is also interesting how the characters speak directly to the audience as well as to each other outside of the story. If the audience had not known about Song’s true gender, this way of storytelling would not have worked. Hwang would not have been able to use the flashback structure to the same effect had the audience not known right away that Song is a man. However, since the audience does already know what happens to Gallimard at the end, he is able to talk to them directly about it, as well as to Song about how to tell the story. It was interesting to read this interaction, but I would really like to see it performed on stage to get the full effect.

Nothing is Perfect

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the people who are supposed to be considered “good” turn out to have some very questionable morals. Even though Mrs. Hopewell seems to think she has surrounded herself with good country people, O’Connor makes the story highly ironic by showing the faults and questionable morals in the various characters. I found O’Connor’s depiction of Mrs. Hopewell to be very interesting. He writes, “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack” (446). This sentence alone makes Mrs. Hopewell seem manipulative and stuck up. These are not usually considered to be very “good” qualities. Since the reader gets this impression of Mrs. Hopewell right away, the overall irony of the story is increased because Mrs. Hopewell is the main judge of “good country people” throughout the rest of the story.

The first people whom Mrs. Hopewell deems to be “good” are the Freemans. Mrs. Hopewell “realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them” (446). The Freemans are probably the closest to “good country people” out of any of the characters in the story. Mrs. Freeman is quite the gossip and one of her daughters is married and pregnant at the age of fifteen, but they seem to have an overall sense of what is right and what is wrong. Mrs. Freeman especially seems to have very good intentions towards Hulga because she calls her Hulga instead of Joy which is what Mrs. Freeman thinks Hulga wants.

The biggest mistake Mrs. Hopewell makes in calling someone a “good country person” is the boy who comes to sell her a Bible. He appears to be an honest, hardworking, Christian boy, but turns out to be a lying, cheapskate with the worst intentions. Hulga sees what he is really like at the end of the story when she says, “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another” (458). The contrast between how the boy treats Hulga and how Mrs. Freeman treats Hulga is the biggest indicator of what makes “good country people.”

No Longer a Twitter Virgin

I’ll be honest, I was very skeptical going into this whole twitter for class thing. My skepticism stems mainly from my anti-twitter attitude because I believe that the world does not need to know every little thing I am doing and I don’t need to know every little thing the rest of the world is doing. Having said this I did not mind using twitter in the way that we did. It was a good way to facilitate discussion when we were not all in the same physical location. It was helpful, however, to be in the same room with two other people. Having never used twitter before, I don’t think I would have been able to figure it out quickly enough if Laura and John had not been in the same room as me. Also, we carried on our own conversation during the twitter experience that was very amusing and made the whole experience that much more enjoyable.

It definitely took a little bit of time to get settled and comfortable using the fast pace of twitter. It was also somewhat difficult to keep track of the different conversations that were going on at the same time. I got confused when people responded to other people using their user name and found myself scrolling back to see what they were responding to quite frequently. This took time which caused me to fall behind in the current line of tweets and just made things a little bit challenging. Another thing I didn’t like was the fact that we couldn’t see each other. This made interpreting people’s comments more difficult because, like Jake mentioned, I could not always tell when people were being sarcastic. Also, I felt bad when I went for long stretches without typing anything. At least in class when I don’t say anything for a long time people around me can tell that I am engaged in the conversation and paying attention from the way I look.
 

Overall, it was a good experience. I definitely would not want to have class like that every day, but it was manageable. It also may have been more constructive if we had a little more direction to the conversation. This could be in the form of a list of questions to talk about that we receive beforehand or some other way that tries to keep things a little more focused.

Jason's Hard-Knock Life

In order to consider Jason Compson an arch-villain one would first have to consider who the main character of The Sound and the Fury is. This in itself is a fairly tough question considering all of the different viewpoints from which the narrative comes. In my opinion, Caddy is the main character, even though we do not get any information from her viewpoint. Typically, when one thinks of a villain, they think of the character that is in opposition to the main character. I just do not see Jason as being in that much opposition to Caddy. True, Jason does not like Caddy at all, but he is more frustrated with his life in general than with any one particular person. He despises that is stuck working to support his mother and Quentin and a “kitchen full of niggers” (242). He does not understand why Quentin got to go to Harvard while he got stuck working to support the family. Jason is angry at life and takes his anger out on the people around him.

The definition for a villain on dictionary.com is, “A cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel.” This, to me, does not describe Jason. His harshness and cruelty come from what he considers to be unfairness in his own life. He is not at all “devoted to wickedness or crime.” He is mean because he is unhappy not because he takes pleasure in it. It’s just how he is. His circumstances in life have not allowed him to do things purely for himself and he resents that.

Jason’s chapter adds to its two predecessors by being the most coherent of the three. A lot of things that were hinted at in Benjy’s and Quentin’s chapters are made clearer in Jason’s chapter. Also, Jason’s chapter gives us a different view of Caddy, who is arguably the main character. It is important that we are given a view of Caddy from a sibling who does not like her. Both Benjy and Quentin were very much attached to Caddy and therefore had a clouded perception of her. Jason did not at all share in this attachment and therefore gives us an equally clouded perception, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, allowing us to create a fuller picture of what Caddy was really like.

Are there parallels in The 42nd Parallel?

I will be honest, during my first read through of John Dos Passos’ The 42^nd Parallel, I had no clue how the whole thing tied together. I still do not have a very good idea as to how the sections relate to each other, but I will give it my best guess. Dos Passos uses three different headings to distinguish his sections—“Newsreel,” “The Camera Eye,” and “Mac.” The most coherent section is the one entitled “Mac,” although I do not know why it has that name. This section tells the story of Fainy McCreary and is relatively easy to follow.

The “Newsreel” section only occurs twice and, for the most part, appears to be information that Fainy could be reading from a newspaper that he picked up. The people mentioned in both of the “Newsreel” sections were actual people who were alive during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also, the lyrics to the songs that are interspersed in the sections are from songs that were written during the same time period.  A final indication that the “Newsreel” sections could be news that Fainy is reading is that a lot of the news reported in the sections takes place in the Midwest, close to Chicago. My best guess for the “Newsreel” sections is that Dos Passos is relating news to the reader that would have been relevant to the setting of Fainy’s story.

“The Camera Eye” section, on the other hand, occurs four times. This section, to me, is the most strange. It comes to the reader in a stream of consciousness form, and it is not completely in English. Also, the mechanics of this section are completely random—there is no punctuation and very little capitalization. I just do not know what to do with this section when trying to relate it to Fainy’s story. To me, it is a “camera eye” view into someone’s mind, but I am not sure whose mind it is.

Deceptively Simple in Every Way

The poetry of Robert Frost is widely read in classrooms throughout the country because students understand it—or at least they think they do. Frost’s poetry can be read on many different levels and therefore can be considered both very simple and, when examined more closely, very complex. Take, for example, his poem “The Road Not Taken.” When it is read with a straightforward approach, it tells the story of someone walking in the woods and choosing which road to take. However, when it is examined more closely, it can be seen as a metaphor for life. The speaker of the poem chose to “take the road less traveled” in life, meaning that he or she does not just do what everyone else does, but instead does his or her own thing. The last line, “And that has made all the difference” (20), means that the speaker has enjoyed life because he or she has not gone along with the crowd.

Another of Frost’s poems that can be used as an example of finding different levels of meaning is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” When it is first read, it tells the story of someone who is stopping in the woods to admire a beautiful snowfall. Examined more closely, this poem also tells about life. It gives the message that we should slow down and take the time to appreciate the beauty of the world around us, yet still be responsible for the promises we make to other people. The repetition of the final two lines reiterates that life can be tedious, which is why we have to appreciate the beautiful things found in life.