Welcome To The Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

This story was very interesting. It had a great description of the setting and the plot was very unique. It was like foreseeing the future with a over capacity population and thus very unique ways to keep population under limit. It was very interesting that Vonnegut came up with such a story in the late 60s but it was most likely because that was when the baby boom occurred and he probably thought it would go on and we would eventually overflow with people, which, who knows, might happen in the future. Vonnegut wrote a way we could deal with it with the way technology is going, we could just be able to come up with such a pill and kill people with consent. It created a unique image of the future about like 200 years from now. He created an image to pretty much, in a way, warn us that life will be like a living hell if we let technology control us and take over. This story overall was very interesting and different compared to other stories we have read. 

HitchHiking Game

In the short story, the Hitchhiking game, the man plays the active, possessive role in the relationship while the woman plays the secondary, passive role. The theme of artificial or fake love is apparent throughout the story because although the woman wanted him to be completely hers and she to be completely his, it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something”. In love, something that partners must both have for each other is self respect, consideration and a sense of care towards one another. The man refers to the woman as “his girl” highlighting the possessiveness he has towards her, his need to own her rather than consider her, her own person. Because the man treated her so lowly, it eventually makes the woman feel like “in solitude it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment from the presence of the man she loved”, telling the reader that the woman was slowly losing her sense of identity because he thought of her as an object as Kundera states, “he worshiped rather than loved her…to him her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn’t exist. Beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself.” These two individuals are on two different sides of the spectrum when it comes to this relationship and their roles. The saddest part is that, this is only the beginning of their honeymoon and their life together. If, it even gets that far.

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.

THE MOST BEAUTIFIED

Beauty is always a topic of popular discussion, and one that comes up quite a lot in literature. In this story, there is a professor who is giving a lecture on beauty and all the ways that beauty is perceived. His opinion is somewhat controversial and the students seem to be in somewhat of a dismay about the lecture. The professor continues on and his feelings continue to leek into the text. After a while I noticed that this allowed the reader to be able to read the story and put themselves in the place of the student in their seat. The reader would be able to form their own opinion of what they are reading as if they were sitting in the lecture themselves.

In terms of the content of the lecture, I think that it is a tricky topic to discuss. Beauty is complicated  and can also be very opinionated. To one person a woman may be the most gorgeous person they have ever seen and to another they may just be somewhat attractive. This is not a surprise as people have opinions over everything. However, the professor was discussing the theory behind beauty and where it stems from. The information that he was presenting was so legitimate in his eyes that when a student was informed that his father has just passed, the professor shrugged it off as if it was just another daily occurrence. To end the story, and to somewhat contradict the sternness that the professor carried while giving his lecture, the final quote of the story is a student saying he never thought the woman they were examining was even that pretty. This final nudge at the way people over examine beauty.

The Garden of Stubborn Cats

The Garden of Stubborn Cats by Calvino reminded me a lot of Edgar Allen Poe’s style of writing using numerous forms of imagery and description to illustrate the story to the reader. The title already gives out what the story is going to be about, which is basically a group of cats who make a woman’s life miserable and refuse to leave the garden.I found it humorous that the cats had a stubborn nature as they refused to move from the Garden when Marcheesa died and would not even let her leave her home. Calvino gives the cats sort of like an ancient, magical, mysterious presence to them as if the cats know what is going on, scare anyone who is a threat to the status of the garden and basically run the city. In my opinion, this story had a very strange plot. The theme of nature versus civilization is very apparent in this novel.  Calvino proves to his readers that nature will always find its way to win despite what mankind attempts. Even when the city is filled with buildings and people, the cats manage to find the smallest part of nature that is left, in this case, it’s the garden, and protect it with all their being. In a way, it’s like the cats have rallied together during their tough times and have made a civilization of their own, along with their own army which is a strange way to look at cats. Makes me think twice every time I spot a cat.

Recitatif

As I was reading this story, I could not help feel as if a friend was telling me this story. The language isn’t improper or slang like but in a way, it isn’t proper or sophisticated. Words like “shit” and the nickname “St Bonny’s used for St. Bonaventure are stated. What I liked most from this story is that Morrsion never says which girl is white or black which gives the story a sense of racial ambiguity, “for the moment it didn’t matter that we looked like salt and pepper standing there and that’s what the other kids called us sometimes”. Through the beginning of the story, Morrision made the two girls essentially equal, they were both 8 years old and unsuccessful in school, “we were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher.What’s important to point out from this story is that this story is told from the point of view of an adult remembering their childhood similar to the short story Araby by James Joyce. When an adult is telling a story about their childhood, the “did it really happen?” question always pops up and is represented in this story as Twyla and Roberta argue on whether or not Maggie was black, But why can’t I remember the Maggie thing? Believe me. It happened. And we were there.

Recitatif

This short story speaks volumes of Morrison’s writing. The issues that this story discusses are brought on in a way that is unprecedented. She never says outright which race each girl belongs to, she leaves it up to the reader to decide. They must decide based on our own experiences and interactions with others. But maybe we are not meant to assume, she may have just left it ambiguous and for us to just guess at it.  I like this aspect of the story because it allows the reader to discover something new about themselves. I also thoroughly enjoyed this story because the style of writing was so easy to understand and to follow. It was almost as if we were not reading the story but hearing Morrison tell us about the two girls. I like how it is not just a story of the two girls when they were young but also the story revisits them as they have grown up and left St. Bonny’s. I love to see how it visits them in a few stages of their lives and how they actually get to talking again after their second meeting did not go so well. All in all I loved this story it wasn’t told in a typical way but it was still very easy to understand and to easily fall in love with it.

 

 

Week 12

The Most Beautified

This was such a wonderful way to end the semester. Beauty is something that is so objective and for the author to talk about such an objective matter is brave. The approach on beauty is also very different in this story. The definition of beauty is based on physical makeup. He looks at the bone structure and the build of a person over the objective things. It is like he is looking at a building and admiring it’s architecture rather than a human being. It is also very interesting that the author uses Helen of Troy as a vision of the opposite of beauty. She is usually spoken of highly and used to portray beauty, but here she is ugly and the professor speaks poorly of her. This whole story is just very opposite of what we normally think of when we speak of beauty. I also think it is very interesting that the title uses the term beautified rather than beautiful. To be beautified implies that something was not beautiful and has become beautiful because of an outside source. It puts emphasis on the measures people take to be considered beautiful. It is hard to really digest this idea, especially as a female. We are constantly told that we have to be beautiful and that there is a certain mold that we have to fit in order to fulfill society’s expectations. It is hard when you look at everything you do to become beautified, and how far from what you looked like originally. It is quite the transformation.

The Evening Sun

The anecdotal style of the story allows the narrator, who is now twenty-four, to have perspective and a more mature tone. However, since the anecdote happened to him, he remembers certain things more clearly than others. This focusing on small details, like the way Nancy’s eyes and hands look, lends a childish tone to the memory. It also accounts for how information is presented in a vague way, since Quentin didn’t understand what certain observations meant. For instance, he doesn’t know what the “watermelon” under Nancy’s dress is, and the reader must assume that the unborn child is not Jesus’s from Nancy’s words, not Quentin’s interpretation.

The stark contrast between the childrens’ approach to the dark and Nancy’s draws attention to the social gap between them. Being afraid of the dark is a game to them; Caddy calls Jason “scairy cat,” while Jason defends himself stubbornly. However, Nancy’s is a real fear; she is petrified of her violent husband, a very real threat.

Morgan Strongosky