Solomon

When beginning to read Song of Solomon, it was not clear where the book got its title. To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure. But one thing I did see was the similarity between the Solomon legend about the two mothers and a baby and Hagar, Ruth, and Milkman. This metaphor only goes so far, but I think that it works for the most part. In the legend, two women are brought before Solomon because they are fighting over who the baby actually belongs to. Solomon decides to resolve this issue by cutting the baby in half. The happy part of this story comes when the real mother would rather the other woman have the baby than it be killed, and so Solomon gives the baby to the real mother. In Song of Solomon there isn't a judge, but there are two women fighting over a boy.

I'll talk about Ruth first, since she is the real mother. The relationship between Ruth and Milkman can seem a bit weird at some points, at least from Ruth's side. The circumstances of Milkman's birth, and how it was forced on Macon are a bit questionable, but regardless, it is clear that Ruth wants and loves Milkman. We have the fact that Ruth nursed Milkman until he was too old to be nursing, giving him his nickname. To me, she wanted to be connected to Milkman as much as possible. I think that Milkman reminds Ruth of her father, and we all know that there was definitely a weird relationship there. But there is also something to be said about the perseverance that Ruth had in keeping Milkman through everything that Macon made her do to try and abort him.

Hagar, on the other hand, has probably the most powerful lust for Milkman that a person can have for another. Hagar kind of creeps me out because she is okay with incest, and she wants to murder the person she loves most in the world (who is her cousin). It is hinted in one of the first scenes with Hagar that she is a sexual being. She claims that she has been "hungry" when she has always had food. Then later we get that she and Milkman "see" each other frequently, and we get that it becomes easier and easier for Milkman to get sex from her. It seems to me that she becomes addicted to him and obsessed with him. And then she snaps when she realizes that she can no longer have him. And that's when she decides that no one can have him if she can't.

Both characters want Milkman all to themselves for reasons that I think can easily be classified as abnormal. Hagar would be comparable to the woman pretending to be the mother in the Solomon legend that would just let Milkman die since she can't have him all to herself. I'm not entirely sure how Ruth would act in a situation like that, but she is definitely more likely to let Milkman live rather than have him chopped in half. Overall though, Pilate gets it right when she tells them that they shouldn't bother with him. He is for sure put off by Hagar trying to kill him and he has never really considered Ruth as someone worth keeping around. After breaking it off with Hagar, he doesn't give either of them any of the attention that they wish they could have from him.

Socioeconomic class of the Cosway family

In Wide Sargasso Sea, it is very clear from early on that race is going to be a big topic looked at in the book. The Emancipation Act was only recently passed, and the Cosway family has not received the compensation that they were due from losing their slaves. With old Cosway dead, the rest of the family is left in financial ruin, and this is something noted by many people around the Coulibri estate. The Cosways are thrown into the lowest socioeconomic class until Annette remarries a rich Englishman. But they are one of the most hated families in the area; ex-slaves still hold resentment for being held as slaves, but also for old Cosway's explorations into slave women. The upper class now dislikes them because they don't like that someone from outside their class was brought into it. So, Cosways probably won't have an easy time making friends with anyone.

Something that really struck me about the situation that the Cosway family was in was the term "white [n-word]." I think this is very interesting because the ex-slaves see people like the Cosways as even lower than they were. Tia explains this quite well when she and Antoinette are ending their friendship: "Real white people. they got gold money...Old time white people nothing but white [n-word] now, and black [n-word] better than white [n-word]." Because the Cosways have fallen out of the upper class, Tia and her friends and family see them as the lowest of the low. The Cosways are social and economic outcasts, there seems to be no place for them anywhere. The upper class made of stuffy old white people don't want contamination from the lower classes and the lower class made of ex-slaves don't want anything to do with white ex-slave owners.

The Cosway family doesn't experience much trouble that comes from outside of these issues. Pierre dies because a drunken mob of ex-slaves. These ex-slaves, for reasons not totally known had decided to make an attack on the Cosway family and estate, first setting fire to the room where the already weak Pierre was sleeping, causing the entire house to burn down, and then attacking the fleeing Cosways. Antoinette, during this scene has a sense of the reason they are being attacked. She knows that everyone hates their family, and this is why she runs to Tia with the hope of being let into their family. She wants to escape hers so that she can have friends and be liked and no longer attacked. But we know how that turns out. Tia has been indoctrinated into the ideas that white people are evil and poor white people are the absolute worst, and so she throws the stone at Antoinette, rejecting Antoinette completely from her life.

Antoinette was born into a very unfortunate situation where, if this were the Indian caste system, she would be an "untouchable" even though her family was previously well enough off. She has no chance of making friends due to the passing down of hatred from parent to child. The only place that seems fit for her is the convent where she is only thrown because her family is all dead or gone away.

A lack of beliefs

I believe that "The Stranger" is a very fitting title to describe Meursalt's character. I originally thought that there would be some odd character the Meursalt meets and changes his life, but as you get through the book, it becomes very apparent that Meursalt himself is the Stranger. Meursalt is odd in that he shares a view of the world that is not very common and very scary to the way of life that most people experience in the book. Meursalt believes that nothing really matters. Nothing matters because everyone is going to die in the end, nothing matters because even though his mother died, nothing changed for him. He does not believe in God, has no ambition, and just kind of goes along with the things that come to him.

These are the types of things that scare the French people who will indict and accuse him, not so much because of his actions, but more so because of how he doesn't believe in anything and doesn't have any visible feelings. Meursalt is strange to them, and their fear of their ideas being challenged is what I think results in his sentence. It is natural to be scared of something that you can't understand, and the French people let this cloud their judgements of Meursalt. Of course, Meursalt is guilty, but because they can' find a motive for his crime, they do not know how to judge him and have to instead judge his character. This is when Meursalt almost feels again. He realizes pretty quickly how absurd it is that the court is judging who he is, but also how he can't do anything about it and is going to be found guilty for being some sort of monster.

Meursalt's lack of feelings make him a hard character to get into the mind of. As readers we still aren't fully able to comprehend what goes on in his mind, even though we get a first person narrative from him. This makes it really hard to judge who Meursalt is. At first, it doesn't appear that anything is too wrong with him, he just lacks a little empathy and is a little apathetic about everything. Nothing too extreme until we get further into the book, where we realize that there is definitely something going on inside that not even the readers are allowed to know. At the end of the book he becomes a full on nihilist, and he realizes that all there is for anyone to do is just wait for death. And he wants a lot of people to see his death so that he can show to them that none of their lives mean anything and everyone will die.

Even though I liked Meursalt at first and didn't have any problem with his character, I felt more and more uncomfortable with who his character was as the story progressed. His crime without any motive is extremely unsettling - it would help me to understand him better if he just had a feeling that he wanted to shoot the Arab. But we get nothing from that and it becomes very clear that Meursalt has some sort of problem with the world that causes him to throw away any beliefs, motivation, and empathy that we would expect from a normal person.

A buggy dude

Entering The Metamorphosis, I was not sure what to think. It is a book that seems like it should be a dream. Gregor suddenly wakes up as a bug one morning after waking up late. The weird thing about this situation is more that Gregor doesn't care so much that he has turned into a bug, but more that he is going to be late for work. If I was in that position, work would be the absolute last thing on my mind. I'd be thinking more along the lines of "What the hell?" or "Who can I scare now?" not "The next train left at  seven o'clock, and in order to catch it he would have to rush around like mad," (8). He is so focused on work that he barely considers how his change will impact other people. The only thing he thinks about is work. His mother describes him as kind of pathetic because he spends his free time studying time tables for trains so that he is never late for work. Work consumes his entire life, thoughts and all. The only sense of individualism one can get from him is the framed picture of a woman from a magazine. He made the frame and picked the picture, but there isn't much else for the reader to know about him, because he is all work.

In some ways, he was already a bug before the transformation. Consider the ant. Ants have one purpose: to do work that will benefit the colony. That is what Gregor does. He works so that he can pay off his father's debts and so that his family will not be out on the streets. An ant has no sense of individualism. An ant is just one part of the colony that must do what it can for the queen. Maybe becoming a bug is one way for him to develop a sense of individuality. He will have a story to tell. Something to differentiate himself from others. Or maybe he acted so much like a lowly working ant that he actually became one. There is a part of quantum mechanics in which people's perception of reality may be able to actually shape reality itself. I do not know how true this is (I doubt it myself, but it is an interesting idea), but maybe other people saw Gregor so much as a non-individual that only worked that he actually became a bug.

Gregor is in a weird spot with his job. He states "If I were not holding back because of my parents, I would have quit long ago. It is clear that he does not enjoy his job. This is made even more clear by the head clerk saying that his performance has been inadequate lately. But Gregor can't leave. He has to take care of his parents. But why can't he just get another job? It appears as though Gregor's parents owe some debt to his boss specifically, and that probably has resulted in Gregor being trapped in his travelling salesman job. I kind of feel bad for Gregor, being in the situation that he is in, but I find it hard to imagine him any other way. If Gregor's parents weren't in debt, would he be more likely to go out and do things in his free time. From what I know, I think he would be much the same. He would probably find something that he could stick to and become completely preoccupied with it. Gregor's buggyness would probabbly follow him no matter the type of life he had.

Alcohol and Irony

In The Sun Also Rises, alcohol is used in every single scene except maybe one or two unimportant ones. You always see all the characters together with a drink (or more usually a lot of drinks) and it is always accompanied by witty banter and for the most part a good time. In my recent search for a panel presentation article, I came across one suggesting that all the characters are major alcoholics. But with recent classroom talks focusing on irony and one important passage I believe that there may be a connection between the drinking everyone does and their senses of humor.

"Mike was a bad drunk. Brett was a good drunk. Bill was a good drunk. Cohn was never drunk." (SAR 153). 

Based on recent class discussion it is apparent that Cohn doesn't have the same sense of ironical humor as all the other characters. He gets offended easily at things that are meant to be jokes and never makes any jokes himself. He is a very straight and literal person, and that personality doesn't seem to fit with everyone else's carefree attitude. He isn't able to see underneath someone else's comment to see the ironic joke that everyone else gets. This lack of irony estranges him from the rest of the group. They just don't like him. It's hard to say if getting Cohn drunk would actually solve this problem and give him a sense of irony, since some people are bad drunks, but maybe getting drunk would help him to relax and see the comedy in the jokes that everyone else make.

The direct opposite of Cohn, I think is Bill. He is probably the closest we have to someone that is an actual alcoholic in the book, but he is also the one with the largest sense of humor. Bill is the epitome of irony, everything he says has to be ironic. "Irony and pity" is his motto, and the pity part is likely ironic too. But more often than not he is completely wasted. Take his trip to Vienna for example. He doesn't remember anything about it, except for one story that is probably only loosely true, but hilarious nonetheless.

Before Mike had his outburst at Cohn, the group of friends gathered together to drink and talk. The alcohol helped them to feel more relaxed and enjoy each other more. The irony is the culture that they are a part of and the style in which they find their humor. I think that getting at least a little tipsy might be conducive to ironic humor the way it is portrayed in The Sun Also Rises.

Opinions of Woolf and Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway, is a modern novel created by Vriginia Woolf in her efforts to move away from the pre-modern era and into the people-focused modern era. Her idea of the modern novel is completely focused on the characters. It should be about how the characters think and react to other characters. The progression of time to a certain goal is not important. This is shown by how the entirety of Mrs. Dalloway is contained within an approximately 12 hour period. Even though this is true, there is still a lot that goes on within the book. As readers we get to know each major character from viewpoints both internal and external allowing for a fairly complete view of the characters. To accomplish this task, Woolf uses free indirect discourse to move fluidly through each character. I really liked the way that the free indirect discourse works. It feels almost like a sort of puzzle as you try to track who gets the point of view. Its feels like a cinematography effect where the camera looks at other characters while simultaneously changing the character whose view is being shown by the camera.

Going into Mrs. Dalloway, I was expecting a sort of Pride and Prejudice type book: so terribly boring and focused on romance to the point that I couldn't read it. While I didn't get exactly what I expected, I still got the Pride and Prejudice feeling of a bunch of stuffy old white people doing stuffy old white people stuff. At the same time though, I did find that I was able to read through the entire book and not completely hate it. There was a lot of interesting points of view (especially Septimus') that Mrs. Dalloway gives.

Clarissa is the most viewed character in Mrs. Dalloway - probably because she is the main character. But I enjoyed seeing the many different perspectives on her that give a very rounded out depiction. There are those who are just acquaintances with her (most of the people she invites to her party) who think of her as nice and likable. Then there are people like Peter, Sally, and Richard who know her better, and while they still like, her, they think of her as a bit pretentious (especially Peter and Sally). She appears to always be occupied with her parties, and being the perfect hostess. But when you get Clarissa's point of view, you find out a lot more about her that she can't exactly share. She thinks a lot about death for example, and the beauty of life. She shares a bit of Septimus' ideas on life and death, just not to the same extent. She does like to host parties, but at the same time, they stress her out because she wants to make sure that they are perfect. I think that all these viewpoints are valid and necessary to have a complete picture of Clarissa. To me, Clarissa is a rich old lady who, while seeming at least a bit pretentious, has very valid and interesting views on life that maybe not so many people share. She keeps on hosting parties because that is both what she enjoys and what people expect of her. She is unfortunately a bit estranged from her daughter who spends time with a devout Christian, against her very atheist mother's wishes and she likes bringing people together because it allows people to get to know each other and experience each other's "unseen" selves - the part that sticks in memory as opposed to the fleeting physical "apparition." Her friends enjoy seeing her and talking to her even if they have some slight negative opinions. Clarissa is an extraordinary person. She goes through much of the same as everybody else, and that makes it all the more impressive that Woolf made an entire novel focused most of the time on her character.

A different view

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker takes place over one man's lunch break. And even though Howie does not have an especially long or interesting lunch break, Baker is able to take all of his thoughts and memories and create an entire novel about them. I take this book to be an interesting view of the human psyche. It is a complete view of the way that Howie thinks and experiences the things around him. Howie, however, has a bit of a different view on the world around him. He focuses on the mechanics behind every object and every interaction. He focuses on the small things that every other person takes for granted and for the most part ignores. I personally really like the way that Howie thinks about things. He makes everything seem interesting, that I originally thought was normal and boring. My favorite example of this is the way he describes urinals. To me, a urinal is just a slab of porcelain that catches my pee and carries it to a place that I don't have to think about. To Howie, it is a marvel of modern engineering. It is a "porcelain gargoyle" that deserves the general interest of the public because it is used so often. He appreciates every little aspect of the design, from the valves to its shape to the logos of the companies that make them.

Howie is very interested in the mechanics of how every thing works. He doesn't care for electrical or chemical engineering, but the mechanical engineering that allows staples to be injected into a stack of papers. He is fascinated by the small office objects that everyone else skips over, and he appreciates the effort that someone put into creating and designing them. But he also thinks about the mechanics behind each and every interactions that people have. Multiple times throughout the book he thinks about the conversational quirks that people have when making small talk. He looks in depth at the small awkwardness when he needs to right something, and is offered a pen at the same time that he reaches for his. Or the "oop!" that people say when opening the bathroom door as someone else does the same on the other side. He talks about pretending to have forgotten something just so that he doesn't have to have an awkward interaction with a colleague. He knows what its like to be a regular person talking to another regular person, but he studies it in a way, I don't think many other people do, and he makes it seem worth thinking about.

The thing I like most about Howie, is how relatable his thoughts are. I found that I have had similar thoughts as him, done similar actions, even though I experience life in a different way than him. Baker makes Howie feel like a real human being that I would not give a second glance at. And this is something that I think is a theme in The Mezzanine: taking a second look. Seeing the ordinary and dull things in a way that makes them extraordinary and worth paying attention to. I don't know how much my thoughts on regular things are going to change after reading this book, but maybe I'll sit down sometimes, and just marvel at all the small things.