YKnow what I mean

Main idea: Through his conversation with the chaplain, Mersault sees death in a new way and in turn transforms his views toward the subject of life. Immediately after being sentenced to death, w e see Mersault struggling with hopes of escaping his death and soon despairing about the absolute certainty of his death: "I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none" (111). At this point, his fear of death causes him to hold negative views on both life and death: “But everybody knows life isn’t worth living …Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying” (114). Here he claims that life isn’t worth living because he will eventually die anyway–in other words, death is an agent that makes life meaningless. Along a similar idea, he says “I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. ” (114-115). Here, Mersault thinks that death des...

Before we started reading this novel, as a class we discussed the meaning of the title “The Sun Also Rises” in the light of the theme of a “lost generation” being portrayed in the book. We said how the title may be implying that the people in the lost generation are stuck in the unending cycle of unhealthy lifestyles, which persists as the sun rises every day. Although I agree with this interpretation, the title could have another meaning: that the sun rises, and therefore there is a chance for a new start or at least some salvation from the misery that the lost generation is suffering. My thought is that this “sun”, or “salvation”, comes to Brett and Jake in the form of their trip to Spain (notice how Paris is mostly portrayed during the night and Spain is characterized by the sunlight/heat).  At the beginning of the book, we see Brett and Jake intimately tied with each other in a way that they are to no other people. They take their private time together in the taxi after the par...

Page 30 of Mrs. Dalloway is a perfect example of how Wolfe utilizes the physical environment to illustrate the internal state of her characters . There are two ways that I noticed her doing this. On top of page 30, the book reads: “[Clarissa] had shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against the appalling night , or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of this matter-of-fact June morning ; soft with the glow of rose petals for some, she knew,...feeling herself suddenly shrivelled , aged, breastless…”. Based on the stark difference between Clarissa feeling as if she's standing in an “appalling night” and what’s actually going on in the physical world (a “matter-of-fact June morning”), we learn that Clarissa’s sadness (for context, she just learned that she wasn’t invited to Lady Bruton’s lunch) is so great that it distorts the way she perceives the world around her. Therefore, the comparison between the outside world and what Clarissa actually experiences ...

Howie's life consists of two worlds: the inner world (the soup of internal thoughts, ideas, and insights that he garners throughout his life) and the outer world (the physical world that he interacts with - his home, the subway, the streets, his workplace, other people). These two worlds are almost completely insulated from each other in that, even if Howie's outer world (physical lifestyle) stays unchanging, the inner world is undergoing dynamic growth as Howie makes new connections and observations about the world. Then, comes the question, which world is more real for Howie?   (Short answer: The inner world) In the perspective of Howie, the outer world is a specimen that nourishes his elaborate inner world of thoughts, questions, analogies, historical accounts, ideas, and theories. He even develops theories and conducts experiments (ex. testing the shoelace flexion model) to develop a comprehensive internal understanding of the physical world. Beyond this purpose of a "...