Mid Term: The Squeaky Keyboard Remake Topic of the Day Customized Blog

I’m going to number this off to clearly analyze each part of the prompt(ish).

1. In this class I have learned a lot about something I did not plan on learning about. This would of course be the element of Goth, which scares the hell out of me. Things that I have learned about goth include the three D’s, Death, Decay, and Despair, the fact that even good people die meaninglessly, and the fact that some authors make a living based on the public’s fears. Why did someone create such things as Goth and magic? In my opinion, these writers need to go live happy lives and leave the world of the three D’s out of it.

2. I hope to learn about the element of joy in literature instead in the latter half of the semester. If at all possible, I would enjoy reading something where at the end someone didn’t go insane or die. I am enjoying my novel for the group project, and looking forward to doing the powerpoint and video for it. I hope I do okay on this first video so my grade doesn’t drop. I’m going to do it today to get it over with.

3. I am not all that worried about doing the research paper because I have done them in the past and they have not been that hard. I have learned MLA in the previous semester andI do not believe that it will be hard to cite my sources. I realize that the grade will count for a large portion of my final grade. I am about to start on it during this week of spring break.

Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants Analysis

Ernest Hemingway was a super star of the 1900s. His work, his life, and his purpose to the world taught people to not just sit around and work your life away, but that your life can be your work. Hemingway was a newspaper article writer, world war one and two veteran, worked in Paris while James Joyce, Ep Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot were all there doing their own work, and was also a newspaper war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. His early career, as a newspaper journalist, influenced how he would later style his literature. His work was short and to the point, with sentences that did not look anything like other writers of his time whom wrote long, lengthy sentences such as this one. He won the Pulitzer Prize, and a Nobel Prize in literature.

 

He was known as the “Master of Dialogue” because he would not only make it easy to understand what was being said, he also made sure that what was said was being repeated multiple times. Ernest wanted to make sure that everyone knew what was going on, as opposed to other writers of the time who did not care what the normal Joe could comprehend.

Hemingway’s life as a whole was a reflection of his work. He became immersed in bad habits, such as boozing, that made him eventually fall into a literary rut. He did not believe a person should live and not be efficient so he killed himself. Like his work, short and concise.

In his Hills Like White Elephants, if the reader knows what a white elephant symbolized, than the story is quite easy to catch on to. Fortunately, I knew this key information and picked up on the title and the way the girl uses the words. This story is talking of an abortion and the struggle a couple, or maybe two people who had a one night stand, to come to a conclusion of whether to kill the baby or not. I found the story interesting, and like the past story, A Goodman is Hard to Find, I watched a short film of the work to reassure myself I had not misjudged the contents of the literature. UMMMM. Two symbols from the story were the beer and the white elephants, the white elephants symbolizing an unwanted item and the beer symbolizing the death of an unborn baby.

Is It Better to be a Good Christian Afraid to Die or a Mass Murderer Aware of Reality?

A Good Man is Hard to Find is filled with bland, ordinary things that together make a complex, deep story. In the beginning, it was obvious that the family was not “tight”. The kids did their own thing, the mom stayed with the baby, the dad did his own thing, and the grandmother was nosy into all of their activities. As the family hits the road, the same dynamic was in play, but the grandmother mixed it up by telling the family that there was a point of interest they were missing, and then she persisted in lying and deceiving the rest of her family so that she could go to this place. At that point in the story, the family starts to attract their personalities together slightly by finding interest as a unit. Unlike other gothic literature, this one change in the family’s personalities was the only character alteration throughout the story. Because of the prior stories read in the Gothic unit for this course, I thoroughly expected there to be at least one more character alteration in either the Misfit or the grandmother. 

Perhaps the most interesting kink of the story was the final scene between the grandmother and the Misfit. The grandmother was a Christian, and asked the Misfit why he was doing these things to people, she didn’t mention her family, and to please have mercy on her because “she’s a lady”. One part of her lecture that stood out to me was when she stopped talking directly to the Misfit and cried out “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”. She wasn’t asking Him to take her as His child, she was wanting Him to save her from death. This shows a very good point about some people that call themselves Christians. They don’t want to die, but they love their Lord that will be there when they die. It’s a sad, but realistic situation that mostly older people find themselves in.

I enjoyed the ending. I felt that the ending showed that there are more endings than just killing someone and running away, or going insane and nearly killing yourself. This ending was not the true ending to the story. The true ending happens later when the Misfit realizes that he has the ability to be a good person again because of the grandmothers words that day and the way that she reached out to him before he shot her.

The use of foreshadowing made the story very predictable, with the exception of the final scene. The grandmother says early in the story that, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”. This foreshadows not only that she would be in an accident, but also that she was self consumed because she thought ladies had a certain “shield” to protect them. Another example took place while the family stopped for food at Red Sammy’s and Red Sam walked up to them at their table and said “You can’t win. You can’t win. These days you don’t know who to trust,  ain’t that the truth?” while sighing and wiping his brow with sweat. There were multiple other uses, and all of them were very obvious. The story has an ‘in your face’ aura when it comes to this aspect.

Blog Number Two: Edgar Allan Poe

In my personal opinion, i like stories that have a meaning behind their own, and that is what Edgar Allan Poe brought to his stories. It wasn’t only about that specific killing or gothic meaning. The House of Usher, my favorite of the two, had a deeper meaning than an incestual, short sighted family that went out of their minds. Poe most likely had a deeper story than that that was to be understood once the story was told. When I read it, I had a couple of questions. Why would he write such a story?  How was his imagination able to think of such things as burying someone alive, a family who never broke the direct line of decent, or a man who only ever had one friend in his childhood that could call up such a friend whom he hasn’t seen since?

My answers did not seem to add up, although they had their own pros that could have been relatively true and make sense compared to what I know of the man. I think it is easy to say Poe had a fetish for the unnatural. He had family issues until the day he died, hence the distorted Usher family tree. His ability to imagine horrific things most likely procured from a depression, or lack of the company of human beings. Because he was a loner, I bet he sought the company of people, yet he probably thought he would be socially awkward. Although, he was probably right, I wouldn’t want to hang out with someone who wrote mystery and horror for a living.

Also, I wondered if this ability were a talent or a curse. I know that I would not like to have all of these thoughts racing through my mind.  I now understand why the people of his time wrote him off as a drug head. However, the people of his time did not stop him from becoming a cultural phenomena we still study today. 

Which is Better: Faulkman against Gilman

I enjoyed reading both stories, surprisingly to me, but the one that stands out as my favorite is ‘A Rose for Emily’. This story really gave me a push in becoming interested in gothic literature. I enjoyed the plot design, and the narration. I also took the time to read the biography of Faulkner and realized that this was an exaggerated version of something that happened to him when he did not reply to the city’s mail and he had to leave town.

 

In the first parts of the story, I was slightly bored. Until the story had a flashback, all I could do was doze off and graze through the words. Gratefully, the story took a twist and brightened my mood toward it. After that point I was completely interested in what was going on and read it in a relatively short amount of time. Miss Emily perplexed me because I related to her. I am a wealthy person, considering where I live, and the fact that she was too kept me alert to her actions, or lack of actions I suppose. The lady acted as if all she wanted to do was wait until she died, except when she became involved with Homer Barron. Homer seemed to me to be the only thing she cared about, but the story doesn’t really let on to what may have been in her earlier life before the Civil War.

I found the story to have an excellent point of view, told by one of the town’s people. The details were all told in a sort of “outsider” viewpoint, making it hard to grasp what Emily was truly thinking. I don’t think we had to know what Emily thought though, I believed that that was the way she was portraying herself on purpose. Emily did not want attention from anyone. The narrator tries their hardest to piece together the plot and present Emily the best that they can, which is a very hard to write concept for an author; however, Faulkner did it brilliantly. The narrator made it seem as if the town’s people had no idea what miss Emily was capable of until the final paragraphs.

The theme of the story is the classic story of “old against the new” and one of change in society. Emily was a pre-Civil War girl, lived through the entirety of the war, and experience the new Mississippi. She was not accustomed, nor wanted to become accustomed, to the new way of life in Jefferson. I believe that before the war she was a happy young girl or lady, and during the war someone she loved died. Then she became bitter and numb to society and  that is where the story picks up.

The setting is a greatly important detail because of the South’s views on life before and after the war and how they changed so drastically. If the story would have taken place in the early stages of the United States, or while the American Revolution was going on, Emily would have no valid reason to act the way she did because the people she was fighting against would not live in the same country with her after the war.