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The Sun Also Rises started off in Paris with the characters Jake, Bill, Cohn, Brett and Mike. Everyone was bored and tired of the city, willing to admit it or not. Jake and Bill spent their days attempting to drown the scars of World War I in alcohol. As the plot moved along, the group of friends takes a trip to Pamplona, Spain, for several weeks. During one of the weeks, Jake and Bill head up to the country side to fish for trout in a little village. Hemingway put enormous emphasis on the colorful details and descriptions of country side; much different than how he described Paris as being dull and gray. During this fishing trip, I got a sense that this was a very therapeutic time for both of the veterans. The river represented a sense of purity and the men were almost being washed of the terrors of war. Since alcohol is involved in almost every scene, there was no shortage of wine during the fishing trip; however, it seemed to take a different effect. The men kept the wine in the river to chill it before drinking. Hemingway described the river purifying the wine and when the men drank the wine it brought out their creativity and rejuvenated them; the opposite of the rowdiness experienced in France. I think that the way Hemingway changes his writing style to be more descriptive and focused on the scenery and the emotions Jake feels shows that Hemingway is using this part of the novel to symbolize the reawakening of Jake and Bill’s senses.

Although we don’t directly see war as the readers, Frazier illustrates the brutal conditions of war through Inman’s flashbacks and stories. The Civil War was fought in close quarters due to the lower quality of weapons so “since all they had to do was loft the shells fifty feet to where the Federals milled about like pen of shoats waiting for the hammer between the eyes… It was war of the most antique form, as if hundreds of men were put into a cave, shoulder to shoulder and told to kill each other” (124). Frazier demonstrates how war can make a man barbaric. There was no mercy shown for it was men who may have gone to fight for something bigger but they may turn to fight with the natural, animal-like instinct to stay alive. Inman himself struggles throughout the novel of the effects war has had on him “He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious” (180). He voices his concern of Ada accepting him for who he is now. He was a civilian. Now he barely takes an extra thought to killing someone brutally if it means it results in his own survival. He has seen and done things people would never want to go through and he doesn’t know if there is any notion for going back to his past self. But throughout his journey on Cold Mountain, he has shown a sense of compassion in all of his acts of kindness so although he may be haunted by his actions and the war, I think he will be able to return to a peaceful life.

This blog post is a reflection of the section I just read of The Sun Also Rises. In this section, some pretty interesting things happen. There’s a lot of fighting happening between Brett and Cohn, Romero, Mike and Jake. Most of the main characters are still in Pamplona, Spain. Lady Brett Ashley falls in love with yet another guy. This guy is Romero, who’s an up-and-coming bullfighter. This causes a lot of drama between Jake and Brett because Jake still loves Brett. When Jake asks Brett about being in love with him she said, “I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.” Brett currently is engaged to Mike but she is in love with Jake and Romero. She also spent time with Cohn in San Sebastian. This causes conflict between all the guys because they’re all in love with the same woman. Reflecting on this, I think it’s interesting that Heminway wrote it this way because it keeps the reader guessing what’s going to happen and who Brett’s going to end up with at the end of the novel. Another conflict that was apparent in this section was that the characters kind of all start disliking each other. After spending so much time with each other, everyone gets mad easily. At one point, Cohn calls Jake a pimp and they get into a huge fight over this. Also, Cohn starts fighting with Romero when he fights out that he’s been with Brett. Reading this was intriguing because it kept me wondering what was going to happen next with all of them.

Throughout my experience reading my choice novel,”The Good Earth”, I was able to make many connections between him and Pa from Grapes of Wrath. Wang Lung, while his father is still living with him, is supposedly the man of the house, but he does not step into this role completely in any part of the novel. Wang Lung submits to his fathers control and even at times his wifes, who according to the times, should have absolutely no power at all. Wang Lung is shy, especially when it comes to people controlling aspects of his life when he should really be in control. He is a man but doesn’t really take on any of the societal views of what the man should be in the house until way later in the book. A few glimpses of him fighting for his land and providing for his family are seen, but these traits only show up when they need it the most. Pa, also the man of the family, also falls away from this man of the house role, leaving ma and Tom to take over what he left behind. Pa felt like a failure because he couldn’t keep the families land, another concept prevalent in both these novels. One difference between these two characters when it comes to father of the house is Wang Lung eventually steps up when necessary unlike Pa who completely drifts back into the shadows, not taking control of the situation because he is so lost in his own grief and sadness to focus on anyone else.

(Short Blog Post)

An interesting quote that I just read today in my choice GAN book is as follows, “Without removing the safeguards form his ears, the master of song complied, and together they pursued their way toward what David was sometimes wont to call the “tents of the Philistines.” The context of the quote is the two characters talking, Major Duncan Heyward (A British Major) and David Gamut (A Psalm singer from Connecticut), are going into the enemy Native American villiage to try and rescue one of the daughters of the local British Colonel. The quote is comparing the village of the Huran Native American tribe as the Philistines, the enemy of the Israelites out of the bible. As noted above, David is a very religious Puritan type from New England, and a lot of his quotes throughout the book are very religious. A major theme so far in the book has been to refer to and portray the main characters and their civilized British ways as good, and the French and their Native Allies as savages. And even though religious warfare had factored out of the European mind during the 1600’s, it is interesting to note how the two sides, Protestant British and Catholic French, still view each other as less holy then the other. I think that this conflict is still a minor one, but one that needs to be understood in the novel,(and in the real world,) in order to completely understand the plot.

During the novel “The Last of the Mohicans,” the idea of a guides helping their foreign European “overlords” has remained constant so far. Concerning the main characters and their party, the guides (Uncas, Chingachgook, and Hawkeye) have led the Europeans through the forest. This is because the guides are “native” to the area, and are much more in touch/ knowledgeable to nature around them and the motives of the enemy tribes. It has been a constant throughout the novel so far. If I was to split what I have read so far into two sections, one when the group (with all the main characters) are traveling to Fort William Henry, and the second the three guides and the two British officers chase after the three members of their band that have been taken captive by the enemy. In both cases, Uncas, Chingachgook, and Hawkeye continually amaze the British characters in their party with their skill and knowledge of the outdoors and its ways. It is a forgone conclusion that without their help, the British characters would have been captured and scalped back in chapter two. The guides have tracked, found hidden places to rest, and fought off enemies for the entirety of the book so far. It is interesting to note how the European nations fighting in the 7 years war all over the world have their own proxies to fight off the other European nations proxy. Even today, the US has its proxies fighting Russian/Chinese/etc. proxies. War has not changed in the last 3 hundred years, very interesting.

Soon after the Civil war, there were a few acts implemented to encourage the spread of pioneers to the west such as the Kinkaid Act, the Enlarged Homestead, and the Homestead Act of 1862 which gave settlers with 160 acres of land. This along with Manifest Destiny and the rise of wheat prices during World War 1 caused an increase in farming in the US. Though these new farmers faced catastrophe when the wheat prices dramatically decreased when the US fell into the Great Depression and the drought of 1931 exposed the over-plowed farmland and the extra soil led to huge dust storms. Living within a constant flow of dust, it is estimated that hundreds to thousands of people died to “dust pneumonia” where dust built up in their lungs.

440,000 people from Oklahoma alone, like the Joads, migrated to escape the desolate Dust Bowl and approximately half of those from Oklahoma moved to California in hope of settling within its agriculturally rich lands. Migrants from the American Southwest was given the nickname “Okie” and was looked down upon in California since the “Okies” were taking what little amount of jobs there were left. After a few attempts to improve the situation in the West, it wasn’t until the government started the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC) which not only provided three-million men with work but they dug ditches, planted trees, built reservoirs. In their efforts they helped water conservation, reduce the chances of floods and prevent further soil erosion.

History.com Editors. “Dust Bowl.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 27 Oct. 2009

Trimarchi, Maria. “What Caused the Dust Bowl?” HowStuffWorks Science, HowStuffWorks, 27 Jan. 2020

As I mentioned previously in my other little blogs, The American Dream has been a reoccuring theme in a lot of these books. While reading the Jungle I slowly learned that this book also has what these other books see as the american dream. For example, I believe in my second most recent blog, I wrote about the day of the locust, mainly the American dream because I thought that was a very important concept in that book. Faye Greener, one of the main characters in the novel a day in the locust, only wants to be a star in hollywood which in the time and in the novel was pretty much every young person’s dream. She would even wear clothes that made her look like these young hollywood studs even though she wasn’t really one. Another example is Of Mice and Men. In, of Mice and Men the american dream is that if you work hard you get a lot money and retire in a nice place and I would say this American Dream is really similar to my book the Jungle. In, The Jungle, the main purpose Jurgis moves is to pursue the American Dream, the belief that if he works very hard he will acquire all these riches and become extremely wealthy. Also when he moves he expects to find a land full of equality, acceptance, opportunity, and last but most importantly, freedom. Basically the reason I felt this was important to blog about is because this has been a theme in now three books and I think that’s interesting that all these american novels include the American Dream.

In many cultures, land has been passed down from generation to generation, always staying within the bound of the family. Many families take pride in acres they own because it symbolizes their economic status. Many people also believe that owning land means you can provide and care for yourself, on a deeper level, it shows insight to your character and personality. The topic of owning and caring for land is one of the prominent themes in Pearl S. Bucks, “The Good Earth”. This topic can be connected to the idea of land owning in “Grapes of Wrath”. In grapes of wrath, Pa based his whole identity off of his land. But once he was stripped of it, he felt lost and like a failure. He spent his entire life caring and tending to this land just for it to be taken away when the economy was falling apart. This is a similar experience that Wang Lung is going through. The land that he has taken care of his whole life, land that has been passed down from generation to generation, is slowly starting to be taken from him and its reeking havoc on his ability to function. He is suppose to be the provider of the house, the man that takes care of everyone but he can barely fulfill that role. The concept that land defines a family is seem clearly in both these novels. The rise and fall of controlling and prospering off land is defined throughout both these novels. But to what extent does land truly define a person? Does someone having more land than others make them a better person?

In Jack London’s Call of The Wild, the protagonist, a sled dog by the name of Buck, used to be a house dog before being taken to Canada to be used as a sled dog. He eventually reverts back to some of his more primitive instincts when he is forced to survive with little help in the north. Spitz is the lead dog and is extremely aggressive to Buck. This irritates Buck and he begins to want the lead spot on the team. After finally killing Spitz during a fight, Buck is made team leader. Chapter three’s title is, “The Dominant Primordial Beast.” This is where Buck wins the fight. Buck finally shows his true colors in the fight. Showing that even though he was a house dog for so long, he still can revert back to his fighting instincts when he needed to.  Even one of their sled drivers, Francois, knew it, “Lissen: some dam fine day heem get mad lak hell an’ den heem chew dat Spitz all up an’ spit him out on de snow.” (Pg.29).