YKnow what I mean

 In "January Man", Jason states the following as he tries to grapple with the changes happening in his family after his parents' divorce: “What’s left of Tom Yew’s Suzuki’s being picked apart to repair other Suzukis. The world won’t let things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings…The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making” (285). Although this quote is originally meant to help process his parents' relationship and the family breaking apart, the idea of the world being a dynamic body of things constantly emerging and breaking apart rings true for many other aspects of this book.  One obvious example is the idea of departing from one place to arrive at another: Jason's farewell with Black Swan Green marks his beginning in a new community, like how Julia moving away from her family initiates her new journey at Edinburgh. The physical act of moving is similar to the encounter of a new challenge after overcoming another challenge, whi...

He yells and inflicts threats of violence on his children for breaking an ornament in his house or not properly putting up a Christmas tree. He gets into violent arguments with his wife for coming home late. He rarely expresses any form of love or attachment to his family. Honestly, he hardly acts like a father at all. Throughout the book, we learn about Bruce's past, which allowed us to piece together what may have caused him to be so absent from his family. Here's my take on it. Basically, Bruce's physical life was a socially-acceptable version of a life that aligns with his true interests. Decorating his house was a way of encoding and expressing his femininity. His love letters to his wife (girlfriend at the time) were reenactments of quotes/personalities of Fitzerald, who he was obsessed with. Further, his job as an English teacher gave him a formal justification for engaging with his favorite books. Meanwhile, the personal relationships that came along with his ...

One of the most unique aspects of The   Bell Jar  is that it provides a detailed description of the process that Esther goes through as she "breaks down" from her state as a high-achieving, promising next-generation poet to a person who makes multiple attempts of suicide and later ends up in a mental health facility. Although Esther's story sounds like a very extreme case of what high social expectations and the pressure to continually run after external validation may do to a young person coming of age, I think the overall framework of the environment and life as a youth that she comes from has strong similarities with the situation that many teens today are experiencing. Here, I outline some key points that help us define the context that led her to break down from the beginning of her New York internship.   Before the breakdown While she's doing the internship in New York, Esther effectively condenses her life since childhood into one sentence: “all my life I...

Sorry, your brother just died. You can't come to the funeral though, because your hands are all injured. In a few years, you'll be sent to one of the most expensive boarding schools in the country. Make sure you study hard so you can get into Yale and make good friends there. Good luck! This is probably what happened to Holden after Allie's death. He was prevented from attending his beloved brother's funeral, and with no support system to help him cope with his grief, he was thrown into a competitive environment of boys who were snobby, stole his things, manipulated him (cough cough Stradlater), and never really cared about how he felt (Ackley...). From this perspective, we can better understand how Holden came to form his complaints about society, which I broke down into three main categories:  Social standard of success   Contempt for other people's misbehavior/stupidity  Loss of genuineness in life and personal connections  Social standards of success  ...

On the surface level, Ruth and Pilate are polar opposites of each other. Ruth grew up in the large house of her father, who was the only African American doctor in her neighborhood, while Pilate grew up in her dad's farmland and became an orphan when she was 12. Ruth is the mother of Macon's patriarchal family who often gets physically/mentally abused by her husband, and Pilate is the head of her matriarchal three-generational family. Underneath, however, these characters share some deep similarities.  Fundamentally, these two characters grew up within a family without their mother and inevitably were heavily impacted by their fathers. An important way that they are impacted by their fathers is through their death, which leads both characters to become fearless in the face of death. For Pilate, she reveals that interacting with her father’s ghost allows her to feel indifferent/comfortable toward death: “death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead), she knew there...

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...