Mystifying Mischief

Thus far in reading Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M Coetzee, I have found the most interesting aspect to be the theme of vagueness. Coetzee establishes this theme’s importance in the opening sentences of the novel, when the Magistrate does not understand the role of the Colonel’s sunglasses. To the Magistrate, whose knowledge of such inventions has been reduced to its primitive forms, the glasses serve as a barrier between the Colonel and the world into which he has stepped. They protect the most revealing part of the Colonel’s body from being deciphered by the Magistrate. The relationship between these two white men, both somewhat foreign to the land in which they have been placed, is unconcernable to the Magistrate. He refers to the Colonel as being cryptically silent and hidden behind “dark mysterious circles.” The essence of dreams and sudo-realism also surrounds the Magistrate. I think that this is way of cooping with his situation at hand, and ironically the only time he feels real in a world where his surrounding have been obstructed and his life turned completely bizarre. His first dream that the reader is revealed to is his dream of the dead girl, whose body has been matted with bees. At first glance, the Magistrate sees a girl with pubic hair described as “liquid black and gold,” a beautiful seductive image, but upon touching the girl the bees reveal themselves. His dream is a foreshadow to his encounter with the blind girl; the girl is presented as an innocent figure in his dream, while the bees a symbol for the empire, almost suffocate her with their presence and tease her with their power as they simply sit atop her. Magistrate clearly sees the blind girl’s essence, but at the same time, struggles with the issue of her vision and past. Nevertheless, he creates an intimate relationship, which he does not have with any other human in the Empire, which is synthesized through cleansing her body and falling asleep in the act. Thus far their relationship is the purest in the novel, though it is clouded by her lack of sight. The magistrate often struggles with the foggy morals of the Colonel and deals with this through clouding his own. (373)

Symbolism in The Heart of Darkness

Impressionism

-Watt suggests that Heart of Darkness is impressionist because it asserts the "bounded and ambiguous nature of individual understanding." This understanding is inward looking and based on experience; therefore, the narrative can be described as subjective moral impressionism.

-Marlow assumes reality is private and individual and that no other man can know what they are actually seeing.

-His text is also impressionist because of his methods of approaching visual descriptions. He is concerned with individual sense to give his text meaning. This technique is one of his innovations in Heart of Darkness.

-An example Conrad's impressionism is his use of fog and its relation to the story. The narrator established that Marlow's story would not be centered on the meaning, instead, its meaning will not be fully visible and possible unnoticed like "the presence of dust particles and water vapor in a pace that normally looks dark and void.

-However, Conrad probably was not an impressionist, because his tastes in music and painting were distinctly old-fashioned, and he apparently disliked Van Gogh. Conrad thought that impressionism was strictly concerned with visual appearances.

Symbolism

- Conrad had many letter's suggesting that he shared symbolic references of knowledge and expression with French Symbolists.

-Conrad wanted to make Heart of Darkness mostly straightforward to give "a true impression," but he connected the world of the ship to the greater world.

- Though his work is straightforward in meaning, he wanted the the novella to have wider and general implications; therefore the piece itself is symbolic as a whole/

- The symbolic meaning of events has a structure, rather than being strictly illustrative

- The title brings together the meaning of the novella. It is a combination of "inorganic darkness" containing an "organic center of life and feeling." It also suggests the notion of the good heart coming to control the evil darkness, but the the symbols of heart and darkness can not necessarily be clearly assigned.

Let There be Hope

Faulkner provides closure in The Sound and Fury thorough the setting of the last section, and the last scene itself. The fact that the last section takes place on Easter Sunday, the day of Jesus’ resurrections and a symbol of rebirth, provides hope for the Compson family. While Jason is trying to find Quentin and mother is ill in bed, Dilsey takes the true structure of the family, Luster, Benjy, and herself to church. I think that they are the only connecting characters in the story keeping the Compson family, a true family, because they are the only morally sound people in the family, not causing any trouble. It is also significant that all the others have been weeded out to go to church; Faulkner is trying to show that only the faithful are left, which gives the reader hope that even though most of the family has crumbled, maybe this structure will live on as a healthy family. This notion of a movement towards stability is also exemplified in the last scene. In an effort to show off to his friends, Luster goes let around the statue in town, as apposed to right, the way in which Benjy is accustomed to seeing the world. This change disturbs Benjy greatly, because he cannot cope with any disturbance of order in his life. After being yelled out by Jason, Luster turns around and the last sentence of the book explains that everything went back to its ordered place. The barely visible motifs of hope and order, suggest that the structured part of the Compson family will come together in the future. (270)

The Whole Truth?

I read the article “The Sound and the Fury: A study in Perspective” by Olga W. Vickery. Olga presents the idea that the theme is not explicitly stated in the novel but rather in the novel’s unconventional structure. By abstractly presenting the same events through the eyes of the three brothers, Faulkner gradually helps clarify the actually events, but at the same time the reader is left to cipher through the bias of each character, reconstructing the plot and deciding its meaning for himself. Since each section began with the true story and then was slightly obscured by bias, Olga believes that the theme of The Sound and the Fury is the “relationship between the act and man’s apprehension of the act, between event and interpretation, and since each man has a different interpretation of the events, it is not that he is explicably or consciously trying to spin the events to look favorable on his own view, but he is simple relating the events as they occurred in his mind. In a sense each man created his own truth. Olga’s first point, before she digs into deconstructing the structure of the novel, is that the children’s water splashing scene on the night of Damuddy’s death foreshadows the entire novel. The structure of the novel is parallel in this scene, because the reader sees the brother’s different reactions to Damuddy’s death, which as children none of them can quite grasp yet. This scene mainly focuses on the objective narrative of the dramatic event, while serving as a study on perspective of the boys. This event foreshadows not the rest of the plot, but how the rest of the plot will be presented, for Caddy’s soirée with Dalton Ames then becomes the focal point of the novel, which is presented both through concrete plot and dramatic narrative of the brothers.

I liked this article, because it presented the theme through unconventional ways. While it is quite obvious to the reader that the novel is being presented through the voices of the brothers, and therefore, each must have some amount of bias, it is not evident that one of the themes is presented in the novel’s structure. My favorite part of this article was Olga’s interpretation of the water-splashing scene, because I found the night of Damuddy’s death saturated with foreshadow, such as when Caddy stains her underwear, and Dilsey can not wash off the dirt before she goes to bed, foreshadowing her future sexual impurities. However, even though this night foreshadows the events of the novel, I never looked to it to foreshadow its unconventional structure. The article is insightful and at times confusing, but ultimately helped me to look at The Sound and the Fury from a new perspective. (460)

The Royal Race

Most of Battle Royal is concrete. A black boy feels honored and superior to his fellow black classmates, because he is asked to recite a speech at a white men’s smoker, but the white men only want his oration merely as an act in their circus, and force him to watch an erotic dance and take part in their Battle Royal. The narrator takes part in this fight so that he may deliver his speech latter on in the night and further gain the respect of the white men. While this plotline is interesting, the themes of racial superiority and the limitedness of the American dream are enforced by the imagery of the nation’s colors and the presence of smoke during the dancing and fighting scenes.

Representing the American ideals, negative red, white and blue imagery is dispersed throughout the story. The white oppressors are described as being ‘lily-white”, having blue eyes, and red faces. Though Ellison describes the men a “lily white,” suggesting purity, their red faces, due to alcohol consumption and excitement from watching the boys’ struggle, actually mocks their self-righteousness. The erotic dancing female, having blonde hair, blue eye shadow, red lips, and an American flag tattoo, represents a perverse version of lady liberty. Her tattoo is placed on a sensual part of her body, mocking the very ideas it represents. Enchanted by her performance the corrupted men’s inner beast is revived, as they proceed to hunt and toss their meat about the room. Their superiority of this delicate creature prepares the reader for their treatment of the black boys, whose eyes are immediately suffocated by the white bands like those of the American flag. The boys are literally and figuratively blinded by the white race. The red blood and blue light motifs emphasize their blindness to the fact that in the white man’s society the American dream does not pertain to them. Both colors literally cloud the narrator’s vision; through his blindfold the only distinct color the narrator sees is the blue light, while once he is knocked down, red slowly disperses over the band. Consumed by the idea of reciting his speech in front of the only people fit to judge it, the narrator is naive of the white mans’ corruption. They reduce the black boys to their ancestral status of savages. Upon removing the white cloth, the narrator has a slight epiphany, and directs his opponent to fake a loss and offers him the prize. It is the black boys’ first attempt to work as cohesive unit. Up until this point the white men have been able to weaken the boys by plotting them against each other, leading them to believe that they were being looked highly upon for doing the white man’s will. Their failure to compromise is the struggle that they will continue to face as a divided race, as the homogenous American colors are not strong when separated. Ellison mocks America by disrespecting the nation’s colors.

The white cigar smoke is emphasized during the most perverted scenes in the story as a symbol of white superiority. The smoke “clings” to the girl’s seductive body, just as the men’s “beefy fingers sink into her soft flesh.” Though the girl appeared to be unaffected by the smoke, her terrified and disgusted eyes reveal her true animosity towards the white men; therefore, she must have been forced to dance, or she is in desperate need of the money amongst the white man’s world. Both the men and the smoke are omnipresent, stifling her integrity. After being blindfolded, the narrator, also subjecting himself to the white man’s will, feels as though the smoke is a dagger piercing his body. This imagery foreshadows the narrator’s realization of the men’s indirect abuse. With each blow the smoke proportionately cuts off his ability to breath, just as the white men suffocate his race. Even when the narrator realizes that he can vaguely recognize figures, enough to be successful in the fight, the smoke is also visible, distorting his vision. A member of the pack shouts a bet against the narrator, who has to actually ask himself if he should lose the fight in order to submit himself to the white man. Rather than fight against the while man, he fights for him. Amorphous smoke has the ability to spread wherever it pleases, and if enough if present, suffocate its victim, just as the white men have uniformly asserted their superiority.

Ellison uses the American colors to reveal the white man’s corruption, and the smoke to reveal his superiority. The story hints at the narrator’s future ability to see the vivid colors, but his vision remains foggy; though, the fact that he is haunted by the dream and becomes invisible, a step above visibly abiding by the white man’s wishes, gives the reader hope that he will rise above the suppression and fight for, not against, what he believes in. (878)




What does the imagery of the circus represent?

What was the significance of the electric rug and fake gold coins?

How come the boys work against each other? Does it have to do with the cash prize or it is something deeper?

How do you feel about the narrator at the end of the story? Pathos? Resentment?

Contradictions

Often people hide behind their self-proclaimed, religious façades. The ardent church attendees and devout bible readers can also be hypocritical monsters. So wrapped up in the technicalities of religion are they that pure intentions are forgotten. In Revelations by Flannery O’ Connor, Mrs. Turpin is so enthralled in her own definition of righteousness that she is ignorant of her impiety. In her mind people are placed on a ladder to heaven by ascending class order. Her time is spent reviewing this line and struggling with those groups whom she sees misfit. She often speaks on God’s behalf and feels that she this omni knowledge of people. In Mrs. Turpin’s mind Jesus conscientiously rewarded her with being a respectable white woman and by doing so placed her closer to heaven. Turpin is forgetful of Christianity’s recurring theme that those who suffer prosper in heaven. She proclaims that her life’s philosophy is to help all in need, but her helping is for her own satisfaction. Her own religious self-righteousness has clouded even the most simply of Christian morals.

Mrs. Turpin is a bossy, judgmental and ungrateful woman. She is the superior figure in her marriage. Though Claud, her husband, has an ulcer on his leg, when Mrs. Turpin cannot find a seat he simply sighs and begins to rise. Rather than be flattered that he would give up his seat, she demands that he sits down, and has justify to her audience that he has an ulcer. In complete submission Claud rolles up his pant leg and reveals the purple swelling. In this scene Claud’s actions reveal that he is subordinate to Mrs. Turpin. Her next order of business is classifying the people, when she cannot sleep; she is comforted by reviewing the distinct classes and putting herself in line. Seated next to her is the blue-eyed fat girl, next to the girl is a “leathery old woman,” and across the room a “pleasant lady, the mother of the disrespectful child, and after an examination of their shoe selections, their castes defined them. Every aspect of the people was a result of their class.

In the disillusioned mind of Mr. Turpin, being black dirty or ugly is an impurity from God; therefore, as a white homeowner Jesus destined her to be a better person. Even Mrs. Turpin’s hogs are superior to most; they are raised on concrete and washed daily; almost like she is fearful that others will judge her on her on the cleanliness of her animals. After the reader learns about her hog washing, Mary Grace, the fat girl, calls her a hog, alluding to the fact that Mrs. Turpin is symbolically trying to cleanse herself of her impurities. But a hog cannot erase its identity; it may seem superior because of its lack of dirt but inside it remains a naturally dirty animal. Mrs. Turpin pretends to be a friend to the black help, but this falsehood is only for her own benefit. She even defends the race to the trashy lady saying that they are different kinds of black people, but had she believed this statement, she would not have lumped blacks into one category on her caste ladder. When the delivery boy enters the office her fist observation is that he is “colored,” and after a short description of his delivery, she returns to the fact that he is “very black.” Though she objects to the Christian notion that all people are equal, she considers herself holy.
O’Connor reveals Mrs. Turpin’s impiety not only through her actions but symbolically. In the waiting room gospel music is playing creating the illusion that the room is not only a waiting room for the doctor, but also to heaven. Like trying to jam the wrong puzzle piece into a space, Mrs. Turpin does not fit. O’ Connor opens the story with the fact that Mrs.Turpin is too large for the room, and the tension grows when the seat fits her like a corset. Her character is too inflated for heaven. Her name is not revealed until the last quarter of the story; by creating this formal situation, O’ Connor does not want the reader to feel a connections towards her. Even her name, Ruby, has a connotation of both beauty and impiety. Rubies are precious, expensive gems, the type of lady that Mrs. Turpin wants to emulate, but they are also red, which is associated with the devil, and is a representative of her true character.
Mrs. Turpin’s character can be summarized by saying that she is a character of contradictions. It is almost as though she looks at herself through a distorted mirror, for she is truly blind to her ignorance. As a reader her blindness is tough categorize. Because the reader is torn between sympathy and hatred, thorough out the story, her transformation at the end of the story is unexpected but realistic. The light is finally shown on Mrs. Turpin, ironically, in the hogs’ pen, and her foggy reflection is ultimately cleared, seeing herself as a true hypocrite, and vowing to become a true child of God.

Misconceptions

On the onset of Teenage Wasteland, Daisy, mother of Donny, appears to be well qualified for the position of mother, but as the story progresses one by one those qualifications diminish. The story opens with Daisy’s nostalgia to go back to a time when Donny was younger and more innocent. I think every mother has this feeling of wishing to go back to the simpler days, where her child’s departure was not in sight, but Daisy’s longing is different; it implies that she wants her son to revert back to his childhood self, because he was easier to govern. Every aspect of his description has connotations of his transformation from light to dark: his hair was once short and blonde, but now long and dark, those round cheeks, now sharp. As a former fourth grade teacher, Daisy knows how to deal with younger children, her comfort zone, but teenagers are more complex than the simple minds of fourth grades, and Daisy could not make the adjustment. Donny’s deviation from his younger characteristics appears to embarrass Daisy. Upon hearing the principal’s declaration of Donny’s laziness, disruptiveness, and disobedience her own insecurities consume her mind: what if he does not think her an adequate parent, or that she does not care, how must she, an overweight woman, appear? As a mother, it was her duty to decide how to punish and change Donny’s actions; this is the first time the reader sees Daisy fail, though only slightly, as a mother.

Daisy is blind to her failure as a mother; in her mind she followed every rule by enforcing curfew, making her son finish his homework before talking on the phone, or watching TV, but her Waterloo came through not understanding her son. This miscommunication disabled her to discipline her son’s manipulative ways, and aid his internal illness. Donny was a troubled kid, always acting out, and it is not clear if he was trying to get attention or if he was just hurting, but I think one reason for his disobedience was his the absence of his father without whom Donny lacked a male figure to look up to. When the counselor decided that Donny needed a tutor with a psychology background, the parents dutifully obliged, and in steprd Cal, Donny’s sudo-father figure, a middle aged kid who throughout the story is not associated with a single adult, except for his failed marriage. Donny’s parents notice his newfound happiness, but only at the expense of his failing grades and rude behavior. Cal persuades Donny’s parents to disregard their ideas of being a good parent by setting rules, and attributes these rules to Donny’s depression. His methods are absurd and unnatural, and Daisy even comments on the difficulty of following all of these rules. By allowing him to govern her son, she looses all of her authority, in a sense mirroring her relationship with Donny, becoming the child to an unprepared parent; but forgoing her authority was simple and complexity she could not handle.

Donny’s expulsion seems to cause Daisy’s awakening from this dream world of not having to deal with her son’s difficulties, and Cal is dismissed, but Donny was left without an adult to help him. At least Cal was someone to talk to and during those sessions his mental state was briefly lifted. Now, his mother is even farther from understanding his complex nature and put him into a school and watched him become the model student she always wanted but also suffer until he snapped and ran away.

I guess it is easy to blame the mother because the reader feels that the mother should share this bond with her son where she understands all of his incomprehensible emotions, of course, this is not realistic, but reality is often lost in the attempt to over simplify the characters in a piece of literature. (645)