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.