"History as Fiction" enthusiast

 I wrote this after reading the first two chapters of Black Swan Green. It is my first impression of Jason: Jason Taylor is a kid who cares very much about keeping up appearances, similarly to Bruce Bechdel in  Fun Home.  However, unlike how Bruce hid his homosexuality, stammering is the sort of thing that the harder you try to hide it, the more apparent it becomes. He refers to his condition as "Hangman", and has four commandments for it: "Thou shalt hide from speech therapists; Thou shalt strangle Taylor when he is nervous about stammering; Thou shalt ambush Taylor when he is not nervous about stammering; Once Taylor is 'Stutterboy' in the eyes of the world he is  yours " (31). He really wants to maintain his social status and that makes him anxious about his stammer, which makes it all the worse. I've experienced a similar sort of "mental echo chamber" where the more I think about a certain problem, the more it affects me. However, I've ...

    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...

    Buddy Willard emotionally injures Esther when he tells her he is not a virgin, shattering Esther's image of him and her feelings for him. Esther claims she isn't bothered by that; it's the fact that he had pretended otherwise that bothered her. However at the time, it was expected that men would sleep around, and other girls at Esther's college told her that was perfectly normal. Perhaps Buddy didn't feel the need to tell her because of this. But Esther felt cheated, like Buddy had one-upped her, and she couldn't continue to be with him knowing that he wasn't a virgin. She couldn't "get even" because of the threat of pregnancy and worries about having to marry the wrong man. Also, the double standard that men could sleep around while women were expected to remain chaste greatly upset her.      Later in the novel Dr. Nolan prescribed birth control to Esther, which greatly helped Esther on her healing journey.  Esther tells Doctor Nolan that ...

     Holden is obsessed with not being "phony". He gets ticked off anytime he catches a whiff of phoniness, but he takes it so far that he feels surrounded by phonies. To not be a phony in Holden's eye leaves almost no room for being part of the adult world.      One thing that annoyed me is when Holden criticized Ernie for being too good at the piano. The way he described it, Ernie really did sound like a prick, but the idea that I didn't like was when he said "If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet" (84). He rejects the idea of being good at something to get attention from other people. As a pianist, I enjoy playing for myself as well, but I also like sharing what I've learned with my friends, and I don't like his view on that. It isn't wrong to want others to see what you've accomplished. Holden also dislikes the actors in the Lunts for being show-offy, saying, "If you do something too good, then, after a while...

The circumstances have changed. I feel it is necessary to let you, the readers, know that I can no longer in good conscience continue blogging about the 20th century. I have decided to shift the focus of my enthusiasm to the "Coming of Age" novel. I hope that you, the readers, will continue to support my blog in the new direction it is going. Thank you. All subsequent posts from this blog will be for the class "The Coming of Age Novel".

When I read about Guitar's involvement in the Days, it reminded me of Meursault. They both committed murder, but in totally different situations. I want to compare and contrast their situations and find some meaning in them.     Meursault committed murder without any clear motive, and with little feeling in it. He holds nihilistic beliefs that allowed him to do that. In contrast, despite a deep aversion to murder, Guitar commits murder out of a sense of duty, as if it were a responsibility of his. His reasoning is that he has to keep the ratio the same between black and white people. He also harbors deep hatred of white people, in contrast to Meursault, who seems to have nothing against Arabs.     Meursault and Guitar are in opposing classes. Guitar knows that black people get no justice in white courts; he believes he is defending his people by killing innocent white people (although in his mind, there are no innocent white people, as every one of them is a potentia...

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...