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How to minimize guilt, pandemic edition.

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Through The Plague we see characters employ a dazzling array of internal and external narrative techniques as an excuse for their inability to take “the plague” seriously and lead to the mass death of innocent people. At the center of these techniques are Paneloux’s sermons, centered upon the fact that the effects of the plague are inevitable, and nothing can or really should be done to try to mitigate its effects. Disregard the religious nature of his argument, and consider its empirical effects on people. People kind of like this argument, for secular reasons, because they feel less guilty about their failures to prevent the spread of the epidemic themselves. There’s a reason why people eat this crap up, and it isn’t necessarily because people share the exact religious views of Paneloux, but because they love how he assuages their guilt. And in my opinion, it’s this exact mindset that drives the plague to become as devastating as it got. When Paneloux describes the suffering that the...
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Is Brett good for Jake?

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 One of the things I find most interesting about The Sun Also Rises is the question of whether Jake’s relationship with Brett a positive or negative thing is overall, and whether he should keep it in his life. Does the total sum of the positives Brett gives him, a very intimate and solid friendship, outweigh all the net negatives, his pain and suffering caused by his desperate hope for her romantic affection? And this does not even include the sexual attraction he feels towards her, which he feels is somewhat reciprocated, which he will never be able to fill because of his injury. He even claimed to the reader that he would be fine with his injury if he didn’t have to be around her; it’s not the lack of sexual relations altogether that really pains Jake, it’s not being able to have sexual relations with Brett. Jake seems nearly subservient to her throughout the novel and caters to her every need, always there for her when she needs it. And the question is, what does he get back in...
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Why doesn't Jake want to address his wound directly?

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               An interesting pattern through the first part of the book is that Jake generally tries to avoid any direct discussion of his injury and subsequent inability to have sex, especially with Brett. He will not even directly address it in his mind as he narrates the story and the reader never gets a crystal-clear picture of what specifically happened or why his genitalia looks like. Instead, he generally circumvents this topic and hints rather than tell the reader what happened. It took a good deal of thought, and some prodding from the classroom discussion, for me to figure out that he couldn’t have sexual relations at all; it’s easy to think he is just infertile if the reader does not really dig deep and focus on subtleties in Jake’s actions and language.             Why is Jake still hesitant to discuss his wound though? His privacy and embarrassment surrounding...
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The Hours' Virginia vs Clarissa

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  Watching “the hours,” I was interested in Steven Daldry’s depiction of Virginia Woolf, and her relationship with real-life Woold’s character of Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway . From the outside, it appears Clarrisa and this depiction of her creator have little in common. While Woolf struggles with depression and had tried to kill herself multiple times prior, Clarissa is a stable woman of deep thought and is not erratic in nature. While Clarissa has made peace with death and her mortality, Virginia Woolf is discontented, so much so that Daldry has her decide to vent her frustrations with life in this character of Clarissa she creates. And immediately, this intimate relationship begins to develop throughout The Hours between Woolf and Clarissa.  Woolf and Clarissa certainly have some important parts of their worldview in common, and its clear Woolf begins to paint Clarissa seeing some connection. For example, both Woolf and Clarissa are fervent atheists, and both of them...
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Death in Mrs. Dalloway

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       Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, we see three characters—Clarissa, Peter, and Septimus—battle with the idea of death and I think they respond in different ways, whether it’s coping or giving into death. I think Woolf does a really good job of capturing how different people battle with death throughout the novel, and I think she executes a really realistic portrayal of how people respond to this thought.       To start this exploration of death in Mrs. Dalloway, I’ll offer a way of battling death that none of the three main characters choose: religion. Research has indicated a “u-shaped” correlation between the fear of death and religiosity and indicates that (a) people who more fear death are more likely to pursue religious and (b) religion tends to assuage members’ fear of death with time. Clarissa strongly rejects religion as a way to address death and instead attempts to cope with her impending (in the long term) death through utter acceptance....
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What is the Ms. Dalloway going to be about? Is Ms. Dalloway happy?

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  I think a pretty core question to the beginning of Ms. Dalloway is whether Clarissa Dalloway herself is happy. And not only happy but also content; does she have a lot of regret in her life? A lot of people, including myself, I’ve listened to discussing the beginning of Ms. Dalloway in class seem to endorse the idea that Ms. Dalloway is happy, or at least overall content. I see Ms. Dalloway as a strong female character, confident in herself. And Woolf shares this confidence in Ms. Dalloway. She chooses to have the story focus on Ms. Dalloway despite the fact that her husband, Richard is an M.P. Most traditional English Literature stories would not only focus on the men in general but would be even more likely to focus on men who have an “important” role in the British government. So Woolf is clearly trying to make a point by making Richard and M.P. and then declining to focus on him whatsoever.  But is Ms. Dalloway truly content? To answer this question, I think we have ...
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I don't think like Howie does...

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         To me, the most interesting part of reading The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is contrasting the way Howie thinks with how I think. Howie is an extremely scientific person, and he spends most of his lunch break and his ride dissecting tiny things in his life that most of us honestly consider being pretty boring and meaningless. He connects them to society, our economic system, etc., and while reading it I almost feel like I’m reading something completely ironic making fun of people who break down everything and treat everything like it is immensely important. But Baker is being completely genuine. He’s taking things that people find trivial and showing that they aren’t trivial to everyone.     I compare this to how I think, which is generally focusing on the bigger pictures in the world. I like to think about society as a whole, about politics and how we can organize the distribution of values and wealth to make it function as well as po...
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