Solo-Women

For the women-folk in Song of Solomon, there is a common tie among the women: they are each flying solo. Though Pilate looks after her daughter and granddaughter, she is still the only one of the three like herself, and by being so she is alone. Ruth, though she has a husband, two daughters, and a son, she too is alone and without the love that she so desperately craves. Pilate and Ruth are the embodiement of two types of women, though similar, different. As mothers, they both strive to keep their own safe and make life better.

Pilate is strong, as can be seen in the passage on page 57. "She arrived with suitcases, a green sack, a full-grown daughter, and a granddaughter, and found her brother truculent, inhospitable, embarrassed and unforgiving." Yet despite her brother's obvious coldness, Pilate chooses to stay in the same town he lives in. Her strength is further shown through her past, traveling across the country and raising two girls on her own. Pilate is the strong women, the one who wants to make all the problems in the world go away, particulary for her children. However, in trying to accomplish peace, Pilate sometimes allows the girls to get into real trouble, or causes more trouble. When she helps Ruth to have a baby, Macon Jr. isn't happy and it is this child that causes Ruth pain in his loss of love for her. Ruth is the woman that wants love, in any way, she craves it. Visiting her father's grave, nursing Milkman beyond the proper age, all that she does is a cry for love; however, what she deems as acts of love are viewed as out of place, or taboo by others around her and, in the end, cause her to loose more love then she has gained.

The "plight of women" is shown in the above passage, and throughout chapter 5, through the suffering experienced by Pilate and Ruth. The form of suffering for want of love, or the need to protect those that are most important to one's self is a feeling all women are capable of understanding. For centuries women have searched for a place they belong and that they feel wanted, but also free in. The irony is that in trying to protect others you make them almost incapable of protecting themselves, and in trying to make others love you, the more they are driven away.

In Song of Solomon, even though both Pilate and Ruth want only to protect those they love and improve their lives, the pair end up pitted against each other at times, like when Hagar is trying to kill Milkman, which is the ultimate irony. No longer is the enemy the men that opressed women for centuries, for now it is none other then ourselves. Fellow women who want what all others want. We are all holding ourselves back.

The Past: Present, regretful, and shaping

Throughout Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, the reader is constantly being reminded and taken back into the Compson family's past through the three main pasts the story is told through. Each of these characters views the past, and different people, differently and have different attitudes towards events.
In Benjy's chapter, the past is the present. Everything Benjy does, sees, or feels leads him to the past, so he has no clear definition of what is and what isn't at that moment in time. He goes to the past because it is a time of safety and a time where he felt loved because of Caddy. He hides himself in the past to escape the present and the absence of Caddy.
Quentin, whose chapter takes place in the present characters' pasts as well, seems to view the past with regret. He looks at the past and sees how he couldn't help the fall of Caddy, and how, when he tried to, his efforts went for naught, and were brushed over like every other opinion or act of his. He cannot let go of the past because he is being reminded of it and time throughout his everyday life, and therefore commits suicide. The final suicidal act of Quentin's turns out to be much the same as any other act of his, purposeless.
Jason has, by far, the most sour attitude of the past. He blames all of his short comings, faults, and lack of achievements on the past and therefore everyone else. He is reminded of the past in negative ways and, therefore, only has negative views or feelings towards the past, present, and everyone involved in either.
Though each man's attitude towards the past is slightly different, each one shows how the past has undeniably shaped their present and continues to shape their futures, and how one person, Caddy, has been the unwitting orchestrator of them all.

A Southern Tale

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a interesting book. It gives background on aspects of virtually every Southern family through the tragic tale of one family, the Compsons. The way the family's tale is told helps to demonstrate the helplessness of every person in the world. While writing in a stream of consciousness, Faulkner uses each character's individual feelings towards one character in particular to develop individual stories and one main tragedy of the family that spans over many years. By starting with Benjy, who has no fixed time or place, Faulkner gives a basic overview of what all has happened in the story, and therefore a foreshadowing of what may come to pass through the next generation of Miss Quentin. In Quentin's chapter, the reader gets a more personal and detailed look at events that had led up to Quentin committing suicide, and his relationships with various other people in his family, particularly that with his sister Caddy. In Jason's chapter, the reader is exposed to the new head of house, one who is quick to be angered and has various views of others that are less than nice. In his chapter, Jason sets up the last tragic act that a member of the Compsons commits, and shows how life has changed and things may be too late for the Compsons. The final chapter is told through a person similar to Benjy; while Dilsey sees the fall of the family, and knows what is to come, she herself is powerless to do anything to prevent it as an aging servant.
While hard to read or understand at moments, The Sound and the Fury utilizes its complexities to help the reader relate to the tale and people within its covers. Because of this, it is surly a great book on how acts of the past will affect the future, how history repeats its self, and how we as merely men, even if we see the repetition, are powerless to take any actions to prevent it.

The Hollow Men

"He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
"'The horror! The horror!'"
-Heart of Darkness
"This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
-Apocalypse Now

In both Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now", there is a focus on endings. The endings come in many forms and ways. The end to sanity, the end of power, the end of a way of viewing the world around you. The above two quotes are perfect to show how the stories end and how the other ends within the stories come about. Kurtz's death in the two stories are both different, and yet similar. In the book his life truly does end with a whimper as apposed to a bang. While in the film, the cause of Kurtz's death is violent and what one could consider a "bang", his actual death is the same as that in the book, and the death of Kurtz's power with the locals, which comes when Willard emerges from the place where Kurtz was living, is a whimper as well. The followers of Kurtz see Willard and lay down their weapons to show him that he may leave peacefully. Willard even talks about how, before he kills him, Kurtz is "waiting" for him, and "wanted" him to do it(kill him). Willard shows how Kurtz has even brought about his own end with a whimper. The whimpers from the two Kurtz not only signal the end of their world with their lives, but the view of the world that Marlow and Willard had before. Their views are dying through the journey to Kurtz, they both even allow themselves to be seduced by Kurtz's ideas, but when Kurtz dies, for both narrators, the world is shed in a more cruel and different light that neither had seen before. Marlow moves on with his life, after paying a visit to Kurtz's intended, but is forever changed. Marlow's change is shown at the end of Heart of Darkness when the waterway that once showed promise and new beginnings now seems to "lead into the heart of an immense darkness." Willard's change is shown as the movie starts. While waiting in the hotel for a mission, he states, while narrating, that after the mission he would never want to go back to the jungle again, while before he couldn't wait to go back.
When one thinks of the word "whimper" one thinks of a scared or fearful noise, or a hurt sound. In the novella, Kurtz's whimper comes when he utters his last words, "The horror! The horror!" In this whimper Kurtz shows how fearful Kurtz is of what his world has become, what he has become. The "horror" that Kurtz refers to is the horror that he, and men like him, have created themselves. In the movie, the horror is the war and, once more, the evil that he has seen and become himself.
Both the movie and the novella end in a peaceful way that would not be considered a bang. In the novella, Kurtz dies, Marlow gets sick, recovers, and goes on with life. The movie's ending is much simpler. As Lance and Willard begin their journey back to Vietnam, there is a scene of a helicopter flying over a burning forest with Willard's face imposed upon the scene as well and the only thing left after a repetition of Kurtz's last words is silence.

Blog #4- A Simple Story is Hard to Find

In my opinion, a "Good Man is Hard to Find" is a complex story. The various characters that can distract the reader from the central ones, and the many levels of the Misfit make it so. The Grandmother's last few words and some of her memories make it hard to interpret certain aspects of the story, while the Misfit himself seems simple but isn't. The Title adds to the meaning of what a good man is and how every man in the story could be defined or interpreted.

Blog #3 Far from the Battlefield

"Iago, as Harold Goddard finely remarked, is always at war; he is a moral pyromaniac setting fire to all of reality.......In Iago, what was the religion of war, when he worshiped Othello as its god, has now become the game of war, to be played everywhere except upon the battlefield."
--Harold Bloom


Harold Bloom and Harold Goddard are right, Iago is a moral pyromaniac and he does play a game of war anywhere but the battlefield. To prove this right one needs only to read the play Othello. Personally, I believe that we, as the readers, come into the play after the shift from war as a religion to war as a game. I believe this, because, while Iago has obviously been a part of Othello's life for a time, he has come to hate Othello because he was passed over for a promotion. As for being a moral pyromaniac, he does seem to ignite most everyone's passions by lying about various actions, and being not too moral himself. However, he does this through tricks and other people, which could symbolically represent the battlefield. All that he does to hurt Othello, Cassio, and others is usually done sneakily or not directly, on the battlefield.

Blog Post #1- Questionable Quotations

"Music says what cannot be expressed,
Soothes the mind and gives it rest.
Heals the heart and makes it whole,
Flows from heaven to the soul."- anonymous

"I am goin', I am goin',
any which way the wind may be blowin',
I am goin', I am goin',
Where streams of whiskey are flowin'"- The Pogues, Streams of Whiskey

"When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden."- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

"Time is an ocean, but it isn't a shore,
You may not see me here tomorrow."- Bob Dylan, Oh Sister

"They are not long, the days of wine an droses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream."- Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

"Grief is the price we pay for love."- Queen Elizabeth II

"I despise a world which does not feel that music is a higher revelation then all wisdom and philosophy."- Ludwig Van Beethoven