Recitatif

I enjoyed this story very much. I love what Toni Morrison did with the ambiguity of the race of the characters. It really brings out the point that you do not need to know the race of the characters, all you need to know is that they are best friends and loyal to one another even though the color of their skin is different. Also the ambiguity forces the reader to use the stereotypes described to make an assumption about the characters. This makes one conscious of how prominent stereotypes are and just how wrong they can be. We never know which character is white and which one is black even with the stereotypical assumptions and it shows us that stereotypes are just generalities and that either one of these characters, no matter their race, can be going through what the other one is going through. Regardless of race, they are very much alike. Personally, at the end of the story i concluded that Roberta was white and Twyla was black. It would have been very unlikely for Twyla to be married to an IBM executive in that period of time and she would not have been called a bigot. Also, Roberta’s mother refused to shake Twyla’s hand. On the other hand, it is never clarified which one is white and which one is black so WHO KNOWS?!

the hitchhiking game

I thought this story was really cool. It was creepy but sexy and we really had not seen anything like that this entire semester. I think the creepiest part of the whole concept is that it is very realistic. Couples look to spice up their love lives all the time and pretending to be strangers is one of the most common ways to portray it. The problem occurs when the characters start to really get into character and kind of forget who they really are. Especially the female character. What the male character likes most about the female character is the fact that she is a shy girl and she is unlike any girl he has ever been with because she is the opposite of any of the other “slutty” women he has been with in his time as a womanizer. When the girl decides to role play she actually starts to get really into character and this bothers him because he thought they were just playing but he realizes that if they were just playing no one who has a certain type of morals could bring themselves to do the things she is doing, even if its just “pretend”. She does this because she wants him to be hers so bad that she acts like the type of girl who has had his attention before. This actually works against her. The mind game in this story is really intriguing and kept me on my toes. I really enjoyed this story.

love, dad

This story was awesome! I found it very entertaining and it was probably my favorite of the entire semester. It was super funny in a very corny way but it was light hearted and fun. I love that his dad is a total perv but he is hilarious. He is that guy who think he is a play boy and is super slick but really he is just a rich guy who kind of acts like an ass. He openly tells his son to have sex but to be careful what social classes he mixes with. His advice is horrible! It is the epitome of what you should not tell your son. He openly admits to cheating on his mother when he tells his son that he is very fond of one of their maids. He tells him that he should have sex with waitresses and maids because women of his social class are only for marrying. He also tells his son not to mix with catholics, blacks or jews. Only people of his kind or foreigners of the same social class. This is something that was widely preached at the time which was post World War II. He also tells Nate that he is proud that he went to into the military but he advises him not to fight because that is for the lower class. His dad also adds Ha Ha in his letters after what he assume is a joke because that is how appalling his advice is. You do not know when to take him serious. Overall, this story was hilarious and I actually found myself laughing the entire time at the Nate’s dad.

the destructors

I found this story to be interesting. It was a little disturbing at times but in general i found myself very entertained. The characters in this story are not specifically in my age group but i liked the fact that the characters were teenagers and of the younger generation, even if it takes place after world war II because it makes it easier to relate for a college student. I liked that we compared them to the boys in the Sandlot because initially that is exactly what i thought of initially. Because it is easy to relate to them, you really like them at first and you think that their loyalty is cute especially since most of them have either lost their homes or families so it is nice to see them have some sense of family but then my opinion quickly changed. Of course what had happened to them was horrible but i could not help but feel horrified at all the damage they caused Mr. Thomas’s home. It was not as if Mr. Thomas was the antagonist of the story. On the contrary, T says that it would not have been fun to burn down his house if they hated him. This seemed very dark and twisted. You would not expect a kid his age to have that much violence in him. Their actions could have occurred out of jealousy since his house survived and most of theirs did not. Overall, although this story was a little disturbing, I found myself very entertained and on the edge of my seat.

the vane sisters

The Vane Sisters is a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov. I am no stranger to a Vladimir Nabokov story so i expected a very unique story and of course that is exactly what i got. I found different aspects of this story confusing and alarming. For example, i found it very bizarre that the narrator became frantic and had trouble sleeping AFTER he learned that Cynthia had died but he had none of these issues before he knew this. This leads me to believe that these issues are all in his head. He previously thought that all those ideas that Cynthia had about the dead controlling the universe were impossible and down right silly but now he is catching himself subconsciously feeding into all the ideas about the dead she once expressed. It makes me think that maybe he would not have these issues if D. had never told him about Cynthia’s passing. In typical Nabokov fashion, there was a huge twist. This twist, i have learned through research, has puzzled many scholars, and i am no exception to this confusion. It occurs in the last paragraph where the beginning of each word spells something out. You would only know to do this if you allude back to the middle of the story where Cynthia says that some contemporary author had once done this. Overall this story was too confusing to understand like many of Nabokov’s stories are.

Sonny’s Blues

Sonny’s Blues was a really interesting story from a structure standpoint. I really liked how James Baldwin tried something different by starting the story off in the present tense, then to the past tense, and then back to the present tense. It was something different that I had not seen this year so i think i just liked it because it was “different”. As far as clarity, I think that Baldwin was way off. His idea was so unique but i thought it was actually very poorly executed. I found myself pausing multiple times while i was reading to ask myself “wait, is this happening right now or is this the past?” It was very confusing. I thought to myself that a second read through was necessary but the same thing happened the second time and again the third time. At that point, i had proven to myself that it was not a defect in my reading or analysis, it was just that i did not agree with the way that Baldwin chose to structure this story. I was confused when the narrator was discussing his return from the war for his mother’s funeral. It was discussed as if it was happening in the present but based on context clues i knew that it happened in the past. The fact that i had to go back and forth on that issue and many issues after that lead me to dislike the story.

battle royal

While reading Ellison’s short story battle royal I felt disgusted. I do realize that yes, this story took place in a much different time period and that evidently this story is fiction but that did not take away from the image that the author had painted in my head. It was really hard and sad to imagine the kind innocence of the main character and the way he was treated. All he wanted to do was give a graduation speech which is something he must have been so proud to do yet when he shows up he is basically forced to fight 9 of his classmates in order to put on a show for a bunch of white oppressive drunk males. As if that is not humiliating enough, he then has to fight them all over again to receive their payments which have been laid out on an electric rug. After the grueling day, all the boys want is their money and instead they’re electrocuted when they touch the rug. It is a second effort of humiliation by the white men of the meeting and that is when my heart really sunk. It was such a cruel gesture. It is only then, all battered and bruised, that the narrator gets to recite his speech. I thought that it was such a brave thing to do but i told myself that i would have never gone through all that just to recite a speech. But that was how things were so it puts things in perspective and makes you appreciate the respect we receive today.

the mark on the wall

In my opinion, this story was really strange but from what i hear, Virginia Woolf is a really unique and strange writer which is what apparently makes her so good and interesting to some but boring to others. When i was done reading the story, I was left thinking “Okay what was the point of that?” I think in order to understand the meaning of her text you have to really deeply analyze it and hope that it is a symbol for something or you will easily mistake it for a weird story. Upon my research, i discovered that there was a deeper meaning to this story, as expected. It can be said that the mark on the wall that the character is seeing is a symbol for the meaning of life and you never really know just what it is until the very of your life when you’re about to die. The character does not know what the mark is until the very end of the story when someone interrupts her by saying they were going out to buy a newspaper and they mention that there is a snail on the wall. She can not accurately define the mark on the wall until the very end of the story just like how some people discover the meaning of life just as their dying.

outpost of progress

An outpost of progress is a short story written in the third person which is the traditional style of writing. What i thought made this story interesting was that there was no real protagonist or antagonist. All of the main characters show qualities of both. The way the story is set up suggests that you do not even look at the characters as good and bad but just as characters, some with good qualities and some with bad. In the general sense, however, one concludes that Kayerts and Carlier are the protagonists and Makola is the antagonist in the first read through. Once you really analyze the plot and investigate the characters is when you realize that Kayerts and Carlier are both the protagonists and the antagonists to themselves in the internal view of the story. The internal view is the alternative and the “thinking outside of the box” view of the story. What was also interesting about this story was how many symbols there were. The fog symbolized the unclarity of the situation, the sunlight would symbolize clarity, and the ivory would symbolize wealth. The irony of this story is that you expect it to be a story about progress but in the end when you look back at what you have just read, you realize that none of the characters made self progress. Instead, they express anti-progression and turn on each other which only leads to the death of both of the main characters.

the yellow wallpaper

I found myself very intrigued by this story. I thought it was very similar to Edgar Allen Poe’s dark and horror writing which is rare because I have never found myself comparing anyone’s writing to Poe. What shocked me most was that these dark thoughts and ideas were written by a woman. Usually, women write about a damsel in distress who finds love or about a strong empowered woman who displays multiple acts of feminism and pushes the boundaries. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, admittedly, does push the envelope with this story. The entire time I was reading, I questioned whether the narrator was mentally ill or if she really is depressed due to her oppressive marriage and imprisoned lifestyle. I think that this story is about the narrator being psychotic and mentally ill. The way she finds life in the wallpaper is not something normal people would do. It seems that her husband, John, and his sister also take notice that there is something very unusual about her because they put her in a room that resembles a jail with bars on the window and her bed nailed to the floor. Depressed people do not need restraint in that way. They are encouraged to keep themselves busy and do activities but the narrator does just the opposite which leads me to believe that John might believe she is a hazard to society but does not do anything about it because he does not know what to do even though he is a doctor.

*i had emailed this entry to you earlier in the semester when i could not be added to the discussion group but I figured i would post it so you could grade them all together.*