Category: Uncategorized

In Jack London’s The Call of The Wild, sled dogs are trained by being beaten and then put on a team. “Be a good dog or I’ll whale the stuffin’ outa you. Understand?” (Pg.12). The treatment that the dogs suffer under these men today would be considered animal cruelty and would result in jail time. The cruelty that the dogs suffers show the cruelty of the drivers early on in the book. Teaching the dogs that they are not their friend, but their master.   

Yet this cruelty also teaches the protagonist, Buck, self-reliance as well. Buck was raised in a place where everything was handed to him. After realizing he had to sleep out in the cold, he literally stumbles onto one of companions hiding under the snow. He decided to burrow into the snow, finally feeling warm enough to sleep. When he wakes up, his sled driver named Francois remarks “Dat Buck for sure learn queek as anyt’ing.” (Pg.19). Buck realizes he cannot rely on his fellow dogs or even his sled drivers. The one pup he can always rely on though, is himself.

Ever since Francie Nolan was a baby, her mother read her one page of the Bible and one page of Shakespeare. This all began with her grandmother’s advice to her mother to help her get her children out of poverty: “Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret.” For Francie Nolan and her family, literacy and education are major priorities. Katie, Francie’s mother, came from a poor immigrant family with parents that did not know how to read or write. Coming from this background, Katie was determined to have her children escape poverty through education. Even when the Nolan’s were struggling financially and unable to eat, Katie would not let her children quit school to work for the family. This was common for many families in their situation but she was not willing to sacrifice their education and future. Katie finds that it isn’t necessarily about wealth but quality of life and presence in the world. She wonders what the difference is between two women in her neighborhood. One is Mrs. McGarrity, a wealthy woman but her children are greedy and rude to the other children. The other is a schoolteacher, Miss Jackson, who works for charity and is poor but has a way about her that makes everyone feel well again no matter what. Katie finally finds what distinguishes the two women, “It was education that made the difference! Education would pull them out of the grime and dirt.”

Among the many themes that Charles Frazier explores, he uses the main characters’, Inman and Ada’s relationship along with other stories to demonstrate courtship during the Civil War era. In the beginning of the novel Ada considers her options and one of them is to get married to pretty much survive. With her independent nature, she doesn’t want to fall into a marriage without love and she grew bored of earlier suitors though “all of society stood at attention to watch [young women’s’] progress toward marriage as if the primary moral force of the universe were focused in that direction” (49). To be accepted in society you must marry well and whether there was love in the relationship was mostly luck. When Inman showed an interest in Ada, she had built herself a shield between her childhood with her father and a life anew with a husband and to her Inman was another boring suitor though she began to realize Inman was more than a suitor.

Men are also under similar pressure to choose a wife in order to start a family and carry on their families’ trade. Odell, a fellow traveler who Inman comes across shares his story of forbidden love. He fell in love with his family’s black housemaid though he was already married. When it came to the appropriate time for him to marry, he was given a wide selection of other major planter’s daughters near their own plantation. He chose the women who was “beautiful in a transparent way… though once he got the heaps of crinolines off her, there seemed to be nothing left” (131) which led him astray towards the housewife. Marriage was almost a state of business at the time, and although a loving relationship would be desirable it was never expected and rarely found.

As explained in a previous blog post, Captain Yossarian’s main goal in his wartime life is just to survive. This may be hard for non-readers of Catch 22 to believe, as Yossarian is a captain in rank, but it was revealed in the novel that Yossarian was promoted to the rank of captain as basically a PR move. Yossarian was the cause of a disaster in the sky during a bombing run, and the colonels in charge of 256th Squadron (Yossarian’s squadron) decided to promote him to captain and award him with a medal in order to shift the focus away from the disaster and look good. Anyways, Yossarian has an interesting exchange with a much less disillusioned soldier named Clevinger around a third of the way through the novel, “

“Yossarian shot back. ‘Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn’t make a damned bit ofdifference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.’

Clevinger sat for a moment as though he’d been slapped. ‘Congratulations!’ he exclaimed bitterly, the thinnest milk-white line enclosing his lips tightly in a bloodless, squeezing ring. ‘I can’t think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy.’

‘The enemy,’ retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, ‘is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.'”

For clarity, Colonel Cathcart is the commanding officer of the 256th squadron, and also the Colonel who decided to give Yossarian his medal and promotion. Cathcart frequently volunteers the men of the 256th for dangerous missions in order to make himself look good.

Back to what Yossarian said at the end, though: “The enemy,’ retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, ‘is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on”.

This statement is philosophically fascinating. The Germans soldiers who try to kill Yossarian and his fellow soldiers have never met them and likely have never even met an American before. But the Colonels and Generals who send the soldiers of the 256th on their missions of war know who each of the soldiers are, are citizens of the same country, and share food and living space with them. They have had intimate experiences with the men that they are sending off to die.

Both parties (the Germans and the colonels) propel the men towards earlier deaths, but given each’s situation, which makes the more morally wrong decision?

Recently in my reading, a new theme has come up in “The Moviegoer”. This theme revolves around the main character, Binx and his relationship and expectations with his father. In the book Binx’s father was a renowned doctor and the clear leader in the city and family. But with the death of him in WW1 it leaves a gap in the family and some of these huge expectations have been put upon Binx. Even though Binx as a 30 year old is successful in his own right having been deployed to the Korean War and now is a successful stockbroker his family still looks for more. This is shown by his Aunt pushing him to go back to school to be a doctor like his father. Throughout the book the family tries to compare Binx and his father and look down upon him for not following in his footsteps. Binx tries to brush this off but has quotes in the book like “My mother and my Aunt think I’m smart because I am quiet and absent-minded, and because my Father and Grandfather were smart.” His family thinks he has the same passions and talents as his father and push him to go back to school and often tell him he is wasting his skills by not going into the sciences or research. This pressure to fill there shoes pushes Binx to have trouble finding what he really wants to do in the world. And in the second half of the book it seems will be around that topic of him minding his path and himself.

For this post, I chose two images that relate to The Grapes of Wrath. This first image represents the Dust Bowl. It really reminded me of the first chapter of the novel when John Steinbeck describes what the land looked like during that time. One quote that really represents this is, “The dust from the roads fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way.” When I read this quote, I imagine huge clouds of dust that spread all over the country and ruined the farmer’s crops. Looking at the image while reading that quote gives the reader a good visual of what life was like during the Dust Bowl and what people had to face. Another quote that stuck out to me was, “Men stood by their fences and looked at the

ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust.” In the image you can see how dry the land is and it reminds me of the Joad family because they were farmers and had to watch their land dry up.

This next image is also during the Dust Bowl and reminded me of the Joad family. One quote from the novel that represents this image is, ““How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children?” This quote relates to the image because the woman and her son are starving and appear depressed. This reminded me of the Joad family because for a majority of the novel they were starving and it was really difficult to provide enough food for the whole family.

This blog post is a reflection of what I’ve read so far in my novel, The Sun Also Rises. I’ve read a little over a third of the novel and I like it thus far. The novel is written from a first person point of view, from the main character and narrator, Jake Barnes’ perspective. I like that the novel was written in this point of view because the reader sees everything through Jake’s perspective. Although, it can be hard to read at times because you only know the other character thoughts based on the way Jake describes them. When describing how other characters feel, he could be wrong about what actually happened. This is sometimes hard because I have to reread parts to fully understand what is going on. The plot so far is interesting because you don’t know much about the characters past. You only know what Jake decides to tell you about them and there’s never really any part where the other characters describe their lives.  I also reflected a little on the writing style of the novel because Ernest Hemingway wrote this novel in the “iceberg” style. This style is where the author writes it so the deeper meaning of the story isn’t evident. In The Sun Also Rises it seems like there’s some gaps in the story which makes the reader have to connect things. I haven’t ever read a book that was written this way so it took a little getting used to. Reflecting on what has happened so far makes me curious to finish the novel.

So far in the book The Last of the Mohicans, the English and their Indian allies (the main characters included,) have spoken the English language. Even speech between the English aligned Native American characters, talking in their own language, the author has assisted the reader by translating their language to English. This way the speech among the traveling party of main characters flows and leaves the reader in with the characters, which creates a sense of familiarity and comradeship with the reader. In chapter Fourteen, the main traveling crew of characters ran into a French soldier, and when the soldier spoke, the author did not translate into English, but instead left it in French. The party conversed and tricked the French scout into not raising the alarm, but even “good guys” did not have their speaking translated when conversing in French. Realizing this, I went back through the novel and found that conversations between enemy Indians wasn’t translated either. This stands out to me, as it shows another way how Cooper (the author) displays both the French and their Indian allies as savages, and the English and their allied Natives civilized. The enemy’s portrayal as evil is assisted by the fact that the (typical English reader) is left out of their conversations, and therefore can’t understand the motives or plans of the enemy. Its just another way that the author has used to contrast the two rival European nations and their allies to create a deeper context in their fight in the French and Indian War.

We live in a very identity focused world. We form our identity by our experiences, our beliefs, and our dreams. Our identity will be influenced my the area in which we grew up, our opinions on pressing issues, and where we see ourselves in the future and what things we do to get us where we want to be. We see a lack of identity in the post apocalyptic world “The Road” takes place in. One of the most obvious examples of this is that McCarthy never tells us the names of the father and son in which the story follows. They are simply known as the man and the boy. This seems to in a sense take away part of their identity in the process. A name is a big part of our identity. It is how we are addressed and distinguished. If there we no names we would all fade together to a certain extent. McCarthy uses this to make the identity of the characters more fluid. In turn, allowing us an easier time placing ourselves or anyone in their situation. Our names are obviously not our only source of identity though of course. McCarthy demonstrates this by throwing in other qualities to form the identities of these characters. The boy being timid and relying on his father for protection. And the man stopping at nothing to protect his son and make a better life for the both of them.

By Sydni Dailey

While continuing to read Robert Warrens All the King’s Men, I couldn’t help but think of the comparison to today’s politics. While the novel takes place in the 1930s, so many things about what happens behind the scenes in the political world are similar to today. Willie, the main character who is running for governor, asks Jack, his right hand man, to “find dirt” on his opponents and those who endorse them. Willie wants anything possible to hold against his opponents and possibly swing their voters to his side. In today’s politics whether it be during a debate or on social media between candidates or those who endorse them, everyone is trying to shame the other one. It’s the biggest part of being in that game, in my opinion. While politics should be more so focused on what each candidate believes and how they would help their country for the better, it has always been about who is the better person deep down and what they’ve done in their past. It’s scary that the political world is like this, but at the end of the day it’s very harsh and hard to work in. You have to have really thick skin to work in politics, which––so far––Jack has. While I’m not quite halfway through the book, I have a good feeling that he will be a good right hand man for Willie during his political career. However, with that being said, I also have a weird feeling that Jack will have something to do with the climax and possibly end up on willie’s bad side when all is said and done.