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.