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A Single (But Not The Best) Story

The ideas that Chimamanda Adichie expresses in her speech really caused an impact in me. But it was her "single story" idea that made me think about prejudices that people have on many things. Stereotypes often rule our lives and make a great impact on our behavior towards other people. Adichie's anecdote about her American roommate that thought she was almost a cavewoman is one example; this reminded me of the many times I have been judged and bombarded with stupid, ignorant questions and misconceptions about me and Colombia, mainly in the United States. These type of treatments sadly exist in our world, but it is not only others who put it upon us.

For example, in preparation for our Skype conference with a school in Virginia, many students in our class mentioned, aside that it will be awkward and everything, that they will surely think of us Colombians as drug-dealing, violent persons that live in utter poverty. It was funny at first, but what many of us realized is that we have learned to live with that stereotype of Colombian people and do little to change that misconception most people in the world have. This is something that Adichie says: that we must strive to change those stereotypes in which we are included in by being a better person and proving those who judge wrong. 

The Real Reason for Kurtz' Madness

"Excessive solitude often breeds madness." - Avaris

Madness is a very broad and abstract term, but anyone can recognize a mad man sooner or later because of his actions and his way of being. It can be hard at first, but after a while, there is certainty that a person is not acting normally. In Kurtz's case, there are a lot of signs that he is a very abnormal man, which in turn is caused by his solitude. 

The first piece of evidence is the posts he set up outside his home. What Marlow thought were ornamental picket fences adorning his place were actually severed heads put on fence posts turned toward the station house. This is clearly a sign that he has turned into a savage; no one in Europe ("the civilized society") would even think of doing this, but Kurtz is looking at western behavior through the rear-view mirror on his way to crazy and is acting very delusional. 

He is also known, through the Russian sailor that lives with him, to wander through the forests for months at a time to hunt for ivory. Though it is "man's instinct" to look for materialist things, his thirst for this precious object has gone way too far. He would kill for only a little bit of it, as the Russian sailor told Marlow. Its true that all humans in western civilization are in a rat race to be the richest and the most successful, but Kurtz has gone over this standard and is literally crazy for such materialist things as ivory, even in a world where he lives where it doesn't matter so much: alone in the middle of the jungle and without much contact with Europe. He was sent to that station house to trade for ivory and his obsession for money, added to his mental regression due to his isolation from mankind, made him crazy for ivory and eliminate money because currency didn't help him survive in that environment. As the quote states, his excessive solitude between his trading post, where a ship passed through maybe once a month, and the forest, where he could not speak clearly with the tribe he befriended, made him delusional. 

 Other questions still remain unresolved. Does being with other people make us sane and being alone crazy, or viceversa? How can we know? Maybe Kurtz is a symbol for the decay of the human being, where he stands as a natural breed of a person and everyone else around him are the mad ones, perverted by society. Kurtz can just be returning to the pure essence of humans, where his solitude and protection from society forced him to return to his roots and behave the way he should. One way or the other, we may never know which is the true essence of man. 

Amazon vs. Congo

In part two of HOD, Marlow spends a lot of time taking the boat upstream to meet Kurtz. His travels reminded me of when we went to the Amazon in 9th grade. We traveled a lot by boat through many rivers and I can relate to what Marlow describes, even though some things are very different. 

I noticed his descriptions talked a lot about being closed up in the river in an obscure environment and many times covered up by fog. He feels trapped and with nowhere to go, and travelling upstream makes this feeling a little bit grander. From what I remember, our trips were very illuminated and the jungle was kind of welcoming us instead of falling over us. It set a nice background for the trip and kept its distance from us, unlike in Marlow's river. 

Also, the river wasn't as dark and penetrating as it was in HOD. It was very clear and the sunshine made it even more pleasurable. But there was one time, where we got lost for three hours and had to travel at night, when I felt kind of like Marlow. I couldn't see where we were going and the river, which was once our friend, became our worst nightmare. It seemed menacing and full of obstacles like dead branches and floating pieces of wood. Sure, we weren't exploring virgin and treacherous territory nor were in danger of a native attack like the Company was, but I was equally afraid we were never going to see daylight again. We were finally rescued and all of us felt like we had not touched land in three months, even though we had been on the boat for seven long yet entertaining hours. We had laughed a lot during the whole thing and managed to keep our heads up, and that made it seem less of a hassle to our entire trip. 

Finally, when we reached the hotel we were going to sleep in, we felt like Marlow reaching Kurtz's trading post, but obviously it was a little bit more kept up than Kurtz's cabin and had less native inhabitants menacing us. It was a fun experience, and like Marlow, we got to explore corners of this earth we had never dreamed of, and at the same time learn more about ourselves as individuals. 

Obscurity

In the first part of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, the word darkness is mentioned a lot in Conrad's descriptions. It doesn't always have the same meaning, but it is a symbol for many things that he talks about in the novel. For example, on page 1, it says:

The air was dark above Gravesend..

This is obviously a hyperbole for the situation, it may have been very cloudy but not completely dark since it was daytime. But the hidden meaning of this detail is revealed further on. The voyager, through is descriptions, unveils that he is very anxious and frightened about the trip and its destination, so the weather and the setting are actually just a metaphor for his emotions. In this case, the word dark just defines his feelings before setting sail.

The word dark also appears in another part of the first part of this book, when Marlow is describing the setting he sees upon arriving to Africa:

The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to almost be black.. (20)

Marlow gets this description from the simple appearance of the jungle he sees, but we know that it is not only what he sees at plain sight that is obscure in that jungle. I believe Conrad is referring to the crushing darkness of the unknown, that once man sets himself into that territory, he is on his own and can do little to survive. The obscurity of the land will eat him up and not leave any trace of him. Also, he refers to the darkness of the acts committed inside that jungle, where the law of survival serves at its fullest extent and no limits are set up to where savages' and animals' actions are judged or punished by no one.

Finally, there is another use of darkness that captivates readers from the beginning: the title. What is the "heart of darkness"? What does it represent? At first, we believe it is just a simple allusion to the center of where people with dark complexion live, but we notice that darkness and the heart of it is much more than that in the first few pages. Readers can only imagine what is going to happen next, and if their issue on darkness will be resolved. 

 

  

The Great Nations of Europe

What examples from the song are ironic?  
This song is full of irony. Some examples of irony is when it says: "They got tb and typhoid and athletes foot, diphtheria and the flu
'scuse me great nations comin through." (18-19) It's ironic because you wouldn't expect great nations to carry such terrible diseases.

How can you tell? 
The parts where irony is present are when the description of the nations doesn't match something you would see in a great nation.

What examples are not ironic?  
The descriptions that do match a great nation or whatever its talking about, like "and now they wanted more," (2), but there are very little things that are not ironic. 

How can you tell?
It isn't ironic when they tell the truth, irony bends the truth and tells lies as if they were true. 

Confused

The character that is Billy Bibbit is an enigma. At first he seemed like he was a submissive and weak man who liked to be left alone and didn't like to be the center of attention. His constant stutter made him look like an insecure manchild who never had many friends and has always been overprotected by his mother his whole life. But toward the end of the book, all of this changed, or maybe it was left in the back of his mind. 

He began to speak up more often and share his thoughts, even after being practically destroyed by Nurse Ratched in the group therapy. He is often found around the other patients, especially McMurphy and Harding, and they become good friends. That is when Billy starts to quickly change to fit in with the more outgoing patients. He agrees to going on the fishing trip, something he would have seriously doubted before, and using his natural boyish charm he picks up one of the prostitutes and invites her to the ward another day. But the real shocking decision he made, driven by his original personality, was to commit suicide due to the pressure Nurse Ratched put on him by threatening to tell his mother about his night with Candy. He clearly couldn't handle the thought of his mother knowing he was with a woman; this shows he certainly has some maternal issues. He let McMurphy and the others carry him away and make him take bad decisions, and he couldn't deal with the consequences. This was the big change Billy went through throughout the book: he assumed great power, but didn't take great responsibility. 

Women's Comparison

The role of women has been changing ever since humanity has existed. At some point in time, they were  stay at home mothers and didn't have much voice in society; they were very oppressed by men. Nowadays, women are free to do whatever they want and have slowly but surely gained their right as citizens and demonstrated they are equally capable than men. A big theme in OFOCN is the role of women, which is represented in a comical and exaggerated way in many of today's art, especially in movies. 

The period where the story is set is a transition period for women, and Kesey knew it well. WW2 had just ended, and when men were just returning from Europe feeling all empowered, women had felt equally as strong in the homefront. They worked in factories and production lines to replace those male workers that left for the war; this was very important in their race for equality, as they noticed they were as capable as men in everything. They tried to adopt new roles in society other than being housewives, and this is represented in the book. 

Women nowadays are represented comically as controlling and manipulative, and where we see this new role as effective members of society and imposing persons most is in movies. For example, I remember this case in the movie Daddy Day Care: Eddie Murphy's character is overshadowed by his wife, who is a successful businesswoman and an excellent mom, and Murphy just lost his job and is pressured by her wife to do something in order to gain money and help her with their son at the same time. After he sets up a day care for his son in his own home, we can see that the traditional roles of men and women are inverted in this movie. The wife worked out of the house and Eddie Murphy took care of their house and their son. 

The author, through Ms. Ratched, portrays this new role of women perfectly. In a time where this new image of the female gender hadn't developed fully, Kesey shows Ms. Ratched as a strong and demanding character. She manages her staff with certain toughness and constantly demerits her patients, which can be an interpretation of her being controlling and spiteful. Also, the contrast with the other nurse, the one with the birth mark on her neck, puts Ms. Ratched as a new breed of females ready to take on the world. 

Hazy

Chief Bromden, the main character and narrator in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, describes his experience with a heavy fog that drives him crazy and doesn't let him see anything around him. He uses many different feelings and allusions to narrate how the fog falls over and embraces him. But even though the Chief uses a lot of details to describe this episode, readers still have a question lingering through their minds: What is the fog?

The Chief explains the fog more clearly on page 7, where the black boys are cutting his hair. He sees it as thick snow that doesn't let him move and hurts his temples, but his descriptions leave a lot of room for the reader to draw their own conclusions about it. In class, we came up with a few ideas. The first one, the simplest of all, is that the fog could be simply water vapor coming out of a spray gun to moisten his hair, and that in his own head he sees it as something terrible. Maybe it's an effect of a drug they give him in order for the Chief to be calm during his hair cut. In the introduction, Hesey talks about the CIA using experimental drugs on psychiatric patients, so this could be a reasonable explanation. 

Another is that it could be just an illusion. Just something triggered by his mind, an element that because of past traumas is present every time they cut his hair. He does allude to war terms and actions, which could be a sign that he was involved a war; the event could spark a reaction in his mind involving a dense fog and war scenes. 

This scene also reminds me of a very good song by Radiohead that my dad showed me. Here is the link. 

"Reading" a Film

Last class, we saw part of the movie adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. As in all film adaptations from books, almost everything is different in the movie than in the reader's mind. This was the case for me with this film. In the first page of the screenplay of WFG, the setting description for the play is simple: 

A country road. A tree. Evening.  

 This straightforward description gives the reader plenty of room to imagine his ideal setting according to what he or she just read. The setting I imagined was a country road (obviously) with plenty of grass and farmland in the back. Also, the road was lined with trees until the end and occasionally, some people passed by in their cars. The movie director's idea of the set for his or her movie was totally different. 

This was sort of my interpretation:


And this is the director's interpretation of the road:



As seen, the interpretation between a reader and a director is very different. This is just because everyone has their own imagined roads and characters from the book. The setting in the movie is just an interpretation from one person. And that is the one seen in the movie, so it seems weird to the viewer because they had a different picture in their heads when and if they read the book. But which interpretation is better? I believe the one in the movie is just fine and the director just wanted to show his or her point of view or use it as a symbol; but most of all, it is the image in the reader's head that is most important because it is unique and no one else can see it but the reader. 

GODot

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is a play full of surprises. At first it was very weird: the main characters were very hard to decipher, even in a physical way, and the tone and content of the conversations between them were very strange. Then, when Pozzo came with Lucky, the contrast between Lucky's master and the two main characters made it easier to draw some conclusions about Vladimir and Estragon. 

To me, the role of an invisible character such as Godot is only important as background knowledge, because even though he is constantly mentioned by the other actors, he doesn't ever appear on stage and doesn't affect the interaction between the characters in the book. Godot is just the reason Vladimir and Estragon are there and the reason they encounter Pozzo and the boy, but he doesn't influence what they say and how they act with others. They just wait for Godot and don't move because of him, but he doesn't play a part in how they act. If I would have to guess, considering the time and place this play was written, I interpret the character of Godot as the new idea of God and religion that people were starting to have at the time. As faith started to decrease, people believed less and less in an omnipotent being that was watching their every move. So, as Vladimir and Estragon in the play, they know God is there, but they don't let Him influence their actions.

Mersault is alone

What most made an impact on me about the last section of the book was how Mersault spent his time in jail. Being in jail was something that wasn't something to freak out about for Mersault, but he did need to do something in order to kill time until the hearing and the jury trial. He wandered his mind off to his apartment and went through it meticulously. He thought of the story of the Czeckoslovakian man who returned home and was killed by his mother and sister because they thought he was a stranger. He received a visit from Marie Cardona, but didn't seem interested in her, so she made up an excuse to not visit him again. 

This concerned me because of the solitude and boredom Mersault lived his last days on Earth. It worries me that he was surrounded by people who appreciated him and enjoyed his company (such as Celeste, Marie Cardona, Raymond), and that these same people abandoned him in the moment he most needed them. Maybe Mersault was fine and didn't need them during his last moments, but many other people might need their friends' support and company. I relate this to a topic we saw in class about existentialism: "We are alone". Throughout our whole life, we are told and we strive to make friends and connections for mutual support and good times. But are these friends going to stick with us no matter what? Maybe unconditional love doesn't exist in the world. Only perhaps from our parents and siblings, as shown in the story about the Czeckoslovakian man. And even these relationships can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. So, on the topic of if we are alone, I would say that our actions greatly influence the level of solitude we face, and very few of our friends and family will stay with us until the end. 

Versions

When finishing The Stranger, I noticed that many of the descriptions of thoughts and events  are left at a very simple and shallow level. They lacked depth and it was difficult to deduce  and get explanations as to why some things occurred. Camus leaves some events and people in his book as an enigma , so that the reader can either imagine his own version of it or leave it as it is. 

I saw this style of writing when the author describes the mourning of Mersault's mother in page 7. Camus describes, from Mersault's point of view, the old people from the home that came to mourn Madame Mersault. Camus only shows the reader the physical part of the people accompanying Mersault through the night. He only tells about the woman who is crying over the main character's mom and her relationship with her, the rest of the mourners are left obliviated by their lack of contact with Mersault. The vigil is characterized by silence; other authors would maybe make their character talk with some of his mother's friends, but as an existentialist, Camus decided to let his character just go through the night without saying and with almost no retrospective about his mother's life.

This is the lack of information I consider as the most important of the whole book. The things Mersault is not saying about his mother could quite possibly be the more interesting part of the novel and could give important insight about the main character. But Camus decided to not reveal Mersault thought and feelings toward Madame and leave us with the question, making us as readers develop our own thesis as to why he doesn't say anything.  

Living in the Now

Albert Camus is labeled as an existentialist writer, although he denies this label. He earned that fame because of his novel, The Stranger. His characters live and act as if they were existentialists, living in the present rather than looking back at the past and worrying about the future. Here is an example:

Wherever I looked I saw the same sun-drenched countryside, and the sky was so dazzling that I dared not raise my eyes. Presently we struck a patch of freshly tarred road. A shimmer of heat played over it and one’s feet squelched at each step, leaving bright black gashes. (page 12 pdf)

in this part of the book, the main character, Mersault, describes the setting of his mother's procession. He doesn't talk about his feelings towards her mother's death, nor tells a story of him and his mom. He only talks about the specific moment he is living through by using very precise descriptions of his present state and the things around him, appealing to the five senses. This is a perfect example of the existentialist thinking: the existentialist (Mersault) only thinks about the exact moment he is going through. 

Despite being in the whole process of burying his mother, Mersault continues on with his life as if nothing had happened. He carried on through the weekend as if he were on a small vacation, where he stumbled upon an old friend of his, Marie Cardona. After they spend the night together, Mersault says:

When I woke up, Marie had gone. She’d told me her aunt expected her first thing in the morning. I remembered it was a Sunday, and that put me off; I’ve never cared for Sundays. So I turned my head and lazily sniffed the smell of brine that Marie’s head had left on the pillow. I slept until ten.
 (page 15 pdf)

Mersault, as not many people who just had an emotional connection with another person do, doesn't care about Marie leaving. He just keeps on sleeping and doesn't think about the meaning of last night. I wouldn't say he is a careless person, but he simply lives his life minute by minute. Maybe his relationship with Marie is a substitute and an effect of his mother passing away. And he cared about as much when both left. Marie was kind of a rebound from his loss, a simple method of grief. 

The existentialist concepts are very strong throughout this novel. They are seen in Camus' characters behavior and thoughts. 

Green

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a fine American classic about the society in Long Island in the 1920's. Fitzgerald uses colors as strong symbols throughout the story. Here is an example:

The "death car" as the newspapers called it, didn't stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn't even sure of its color- he told the first policeman that it was light green. (137)

The color green is used in a crucial part of the story, right in the middle of the climax. It is when Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's lover, is run over by this green car, coincidentally driven by Tom's wife, Daisy, outside of her garage. This is clearly a part where a color acts as a symbol in the novel, since the color green has many different meanings. The color green is a color of renewal, of natural wellbeing, of good luck; but it is also a color that conveys envy, jealousy and money. I believe these last three are the meanings Fitzgerald wanted to emphasize out of all the things green can be.

Although it was a sad coincidence, Daisy killed her husband's lover, which could be interpreted as a cruel act of vengeance sparked by envy and anger towards her if it was on purpose. Fitzgerald wanted to show this by painting the car green, portraying the jealousy behind it. Also, it is a symbol for the deterred ideal of the dream that all Americans at that time wanted: money. In a time where consumerism and overflowing capital was king, the "American Dream" as some call it was corrupted to a point where money was the main goal of it. Since Myrtle was a somewhat humble woman, the green car running over her can be interpreted as money triumphing over the real "American Dream", where a happy family and a good place to live was all that was needed. It could be said that in the end, as represente by this color in the car, Daisy and her economic power won over Myrtle and Tom's happiness.