What were Mersault's motives for this killing? "The sun" wasn't enough for the jury, and its not enough for me. Here is a passage that I think helps us understand: "A minute later I turned back toward the beach and started walking. There was the same dazzling red glare. The sea gasped for air with each shallow, stifled little wave that broke on the sand. I was walking slowly toward the rocks and I could feel my forehead swelling under the sun. All that heat was pressing down on me and making it hard for me to go on. And every time I felt a blast of its hot breath strike my face, I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists in my trouser pockets, and strained every nerve in order to overcome the sun and the thick drunkenness it was spilling over me. With every blade of light that flashed off the sand, from a bleached shell or a piece of broken glass, my jaws tightened. I walked for a long time " (57). This is right after Raymond and him encounter the two Arab me...
The story of Daedalus and Icarus goes that Daedalus, the genius inventor, crafted wings of feathers and wax so he and Icarus could escape Crete. However, Icarus grew cocky, flying so close to the sun that his wings melted and he fell to his death. In Fun Home, Bechdel makes a comparison of her and her father to Daedalus and Icarus, which I think is the perfect analogy. Throughout the novel she and her father embody both of these roles interchangeably, which I'll explore here. At the beginning of the book, Bechdel illustrates her and her father playing a game of airplane, which she related to the Icarian games of the circus. She cryptically notes that, "In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky" (Bechdel 4). As they are playing airplane, her father is Daedalus and she is Icarus, but this statement implies the opposite. Her father would be the one to plummet from the sky, which c...
Both Mumbo Jumbo and Ragtime use history to add to the realness of their texts. In Ragtime, Doctorow uses "false documents" that likely aren't true but for the most part can't be disproven to fill in the gaps of real history used in his book. For instance, he depicts J. P. Morgan talking to a seagull in a bout of loneliness, something that cannot be proven nor disproven. Moments like this make Ragtime feel real. Mumbo Jumbo takes place around the ragtime period as well, and during the Harlem Renaissance. Jes Grew is an anti-plague that spreads dancing and liveliness, a metaphor for the spread of black culture. The novel identifies things like ragtime and jazz as elements of Jes Grew, but Jes Grew's origins go back thousands of years. Reed uses what I presume to be (mostly) real Egyptian mythology and mumbo jumbo lore as actual history in Mumbo Jumbo. By using African history/mythology to set the novel, Reed accomplishes multiple things: he creates an Afroce...
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