Snows of Kilimanjaro

What I enjoy about Hemingway is that his simple diction, word choice, has heavy, underlying meanings. Even if the reader does not pick up on the complex symbolism, the reader can still enjoy the story because it is not a hard read. Hemingway uses a minimalist style when writing: using short, declarative sentences with little description. I admire how with little words he writes, he packs a lot into them. Hemingway is also mostly concerned with how when you face death, how should you face it? I find this a really profound statement as everyone faces and deals with death differently. In the story, the main character Harry is facing death slowly. His leg has been infected with gangrene. This disease slowly decomposes the tissue of any part of the body it touches. The disease is extremely painful and slow. The story mainly consists of how Harry is coping with his death and reminiscing a lot of his past. Hemingway makes it known that Harry is unhappy with the way his life turns out. Harry traded money for his skills and talents. The hyena that hovers throughout the story is another symbol. Hyenas are traditional symbols of death since they feed on the dead bodies of animals and occasionally people. However the hyena wakes the woman up to tell her of Harry’s death. “Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound.” The woman shines a flashlight on Harry and knows he is finally dead.

Battle Royal

I actually read the novel “Invisible Man”, by Ralph Ellison during my sophomore year in high school. I remember this chapter specifically not only because it was the first one of the first chapters in the novel, but also because it was one of the most graphic and tragic scenes in the entire story. It depicted the way society treated black people of that time period and the perspective that the white men didn’t understand.

The story begins with the narrator receiving advice from his grandfather about how he needed to “kill the white man with kindness” and fly under their radar. This is then followed by the meat and potatoes of the chapter, the actual battle. The narrator was invited to read a graduation speech he had done that was very similar to the advice his grandfather had just given him. But when he arrived, he was thrown into a fight between a group of other black males. The narrator makes it to the final but loses. The group is then teased with an electrified rug that is covered with money. The narrator reads his speech but the audience is far from interested.

This entire novel is a testament to the way that African Americans had been treated in the early 1900s and this short story truly exemplifies the horrors that could have occurred. In the story, the use of symbols, such as the naked woman with the American flag painted on her stomach, is used to provide a hidden massage about the authors opinion of the ways in which the characters were being treated. It is pretty clear that the abuse that these men faced in the story is quite gruesome and hard to imagine. However, this is only a spec in the spectrum of things that went on during those times. It is scary to think about how terrible someone could be treated all over a topic so juvenile.

Battle Royal

This story by Ellinson was…not what I expected to say the least. When I read the introduction I thought I would be reading a story about a man who was lost and didn’t know who he was or he was supposed to be. I thought the story would be about him finding himself and going through a life changing experience, which he did. However, I didn’t find it to be the enlightening story that I was hoping for. Yes, at the end he did overcome the guilt that he constantly felt from his grandfather’s dying words but there were certain aspects of the story that I did not like. The main one being the way they treated the naked woman. I was horrified and saddened by the way these men looked at her and treated her. She was portrayed as an object to these men, not a human being. When Ellinson said, “I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes” my heart was saddened. I could feel the terror that the woman in the story must have felt. This story also had elements of racism.

The way this story was written is similar to the style of Virginia Woolf. Though this story had A LOT more action there was also a stream of the narrator’s thoughts. We were reading what was going on inside his head as all the chaos and action was going on around him. It was very descriptive and painted a clear image in my head. I could feel everything he felt and I could see everything he was describing. It was just a little too depressing for my taste.

Battle Royal

This story was very…interesting. The imagery was extremely and vulgar. I was really hard for me to get through the story without having to tell myself that its just as story. I just did not understand why he was there to give a speech and they still made him get in the ring to fight. I was confused and upset because I wasn’t sure if they were going to allow him to do his, which was the reason he came there for in the first place. I felt like not only was it insulting to the African american american culture but to women as well. Throughout the whole story the part that made me the most uncomfortable was when they talked about the terror in her eyes when they were tossing her around. It made me uncomfortable because although racism isn’t as prominent anymore, strippers and women selling their bodies are at an all time high so the thought of things as such still happening made me sick to my stomach. Besides that, there were a number of other things that bothered me but the ending in particular got me thinking. After opening his gift and seeing that they gave him a scholarship to a college for Negroes so he could be with the rest of the people like him, the fact that he was overjoyed about college is one thing but I took it as “yeah, you’re smart but you’re still black so let us send you with the rest of the people of your kind” which of course bothered me, especially since nowadays there are larger numbers of African Americans that attend PWI’s. The last thing was the dream, did anyone understand the last comment “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” along with the part in parenthesis where he says “I had no insight into its meaning. First I had to go to college”? Was he saying he wasn’t smart enough to analyze it or not wise enough to understand it?

Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royal”

This story is just sad I didn’t like it, it had me depressed. The narrator, a black man, whose grandparents always taught him to kill the racist white people with kindness finds him self always being treated badly by the white people. One day this man performed a speech at his high school graduation. The speech was about how black people can advance in life. The speech was so good that he was invited to say it at a gathering of his community’s leading white people. He knew they wouldn’t approve of it but he also knew it was for the best. Once he gets to this gathering the white people make him join in a “Battle Royal” where they blind folded him and made him fight his own classmates. Before they blind folded him they brought out a white naked girl with an American flag painted on her belly to dance around and the white men forced the black men to look at her. He obviously had more respect for this girl than any body else there since when she first came out he looked away. He didn’t win this Battle but the ones who did jumped on an electric rug just to retrieve the coins it had on it. The narrator finally gave his speech. While he did, all the white men laughed at him and criticized everything he would say. When he was done with his speech they gave him a scholarship to a black college.

Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”

I liked this story a lot. The narrator to me seems like a crazy lady. She or he sort of reminds me of my self. When I am alone in my room with no distractions I can sit and think about stuff forever! And everything I think about turns into a new topic to dive into in my own mind all by my self. Of course this happens to me mainly when I am trying to go to sleep. Anyway, she obviously has ADD, I see my self very much like this narrator. She goes from wondering what the mark on the wall could be to how it could of gotten there to thinking about the people that lived there before and maybe they could of placed the mark on the wall them selves. Then she starts to judge the former residents by explaining how they would have never hung a picture frame from there. She is nuts! Why can’t she or he just get up from where they are sitting and check to see what the mark really is? Because they think that actually figuring out what the mark is wont make her any wiser, she or he will still never know exactly how the mark got there. Here the story is trying to explain to us that we would never really know what life is about until the end. Just like in the story, we don’t figure out what the mark is until the end.

The Mark on the Wall

This story by Virginia Woolf in my opinion was an excellent story. Though it is difficult to determine what the plot of the story is, it surprisingly had a lot going on. Not physically, but mentally. As we discussed in class this story used “stream of consciousness”. Because there was little to no action in this story, most of it was a stream of thoughts going on in the narrators head as she stared at this mark on the wall. One thought flowed into the next.

I thought it was interesting that she started off this story with the phrase, “Perhaps it was the middle of January”. This indicates uncertainty, which is a consistent theme throughout this story. But in a way, aren’t we all uncertain in our own thoughts? Our thoughts are the only place where we can be uncertain and make no sense yet at the same time it makes perfect sense to us. If Virgina Woolf hadn’t written this story in the stream of consciousness style, it would have taken away from how the mind of the narrator worked.

Another thing I thought of while reading this story was William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. As we discussed in class, the main message of his speech was that we as humans worry too much about the physical and the superficial. At one point in this story, the narrator’s thoughts wander off into a similar theme as Faulkner’s speech. At the top of page 1483 “It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people- what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!”. To me, that was a testament to how Virginia Woolf had the same ideas as Faulkner in the sense that when you strip down of all the superficial things in life, what we are left with on the inside is what matters.

The Mark on the Wall

The plot of the story The Mark on the Wall isn’t a very strong one.  It does, however, pick up as the story goes on.  The story’s title is extremely literal.  The narrator is analyzing a mark on the wall wondering what might have caused it and what it might represent.  At the end of the story, we do eventually learn what the mark is, this however is not what the point of this story is.  The author is trying to stress the narrator thinks the mark is or might represent.  The author is trying to get the reader to think deeper and further into the mark on the wall.  It isn’t simply a mark on the wall.  It could be or mean so many things.  This is what the author is trying to show as the point of the story.  To understand this, one might have to read the story several times or find an analysis of the text; this is because it is not an obvious point.

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The Grand Inquisitor

The Grand Inquisitor is a story about a man who meets Christ when he comes back to Earth in the time of the inquisition.  It is said that Jesus went about performing several miracles that made people absolutely believe in him and be in awe of him; however, he is still arrested the leaders of the current Inquisition and is to be put to death the next day.  The way in which Jesus is to be put to death is most curious because it is through burning.  This is almost ironic because we associate Jesus with almost the exact opposite of fire.  It’s almost as if it is an insult or mock of Christianity.  This is not the only curiosity in this story when it comes to Christianity.  When Jesus is put in jail, everyone expects him to use his powers as Christ to break out.  But he never does.  This is also a mocking of Jesus.  It’s as if the author, Dostoyevsky, is trying to mock Christianity.

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An outpost of progress- week 6

I did not find anything too interesting about this story when I read it. I found moments where you could depict greed and selfishness but nothing really stood out, it was just a normal story about power struggle. At second glance, I looked deeper into the context and found myself understanding more of the deeper meanings. I found this interesting so I re-read the story again for a third time and again I found myself finding deeper meanings and interpreting more of the text as it went on. I think every time you read this story you will spot something you did not notice before or you can interpret a portion of the text differently with a fresh set of eyes. I found this story to have a lot of symbols. I do not know if this is exactly what Conrad meant to do but I convinced myself of many different symbols relating to something deeper. For example, the fog symbolizes the unclearness of what they are doing. The sunlight symbolizes clarity and ivory was definitely a symbol of wealth and power. It is well known all over the world that ivory is extremely expensive so it was easy to interpret the ivory as a sign of money. This story, like The Grand Inquisitor, mainly used dialogue to tell the story which allows the reader to develop a deeper connection with the text instead of reading he interpretations of the narrator.