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“Rememory” and the withholding of Beloved’s cause of death

  Beloved is an extremely complicated book, and Toni Morrison’s choice to withhold the information of Beloved’s cause of death from the reader until we are well acquainted with her (similarly to Paul D.) is no accident. Morrison does a good job of making the reader sympathetic towards Sethe’s situation by making them understand the cruelty and trauma of her experiences with slavery as much as they possibly can. The point is not to make them feel that they would have done the same or that what she did was right, but rather to see it from her perspective and understand that in her eyes it was an act of love. Loving and courageous are two traits of Sethe’s that stand out at least after reading the first part of the book. The telling of Denver’s birth story where Sethe was crawling through the woods, trying to get to her children despite her seemingly low chance of survival because she was determined to survive for them, “not to have an easeful death,” (Morrison, 38). Her motivation...
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On Meursault and the Concept of Guilt

On Meursault and the Concept of Guilt        The Stranger is a very unique, thought provoking, and hard-to-interpret book. How are we as readers supposed to find any purpose in the story of this essentially purposeless man? Meursault essentially views all of his actions as a result of circumstance. He doesn’t have many feelings beyond the instant and physical. He is even unbothered by the murder he committed. He describes what he’s feeling as he’s walking towards the Arab by saying that “the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back,” showing that although he very well could have turned around, he felt that he had to go on (Camus, 58). If he feels like he physically must commit the murder, is he really guilty of it? Guilt is a complicated subject in The Stranger , one that the court gets stuck on as they come to realize it’s something he lacks, as the prosecutor stated, “I [Meursault] had no place in a society whose fundamental rules I ignored,” (C...
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Does Jake End in the Same Place He Started?

The question I am left with at the end of The Sun Also Rises is this: Do Jake and Brett end in the same place they started? With their relationship essentially being the main conflict of the book, ordinarily, we would see a clear, linear change from beginning to end. Hemingway, however, is no ordinary writer, and we, the audience, must interpret for ourselves whether or not there is any difference.  This pondering seems to be intentionally brought out by the repetition of the taxi scenes with Brett and Jake. Within the first few chapters and in the very end, we see them pictured in the back of a taxi together, and this repetition is no coincidence. In the first of these taxi scenes, we see Jake say to Brett “there’s not a damn thing we could do,” (34). Here, Jake is more frustrated than anything. Moments before, Brett had just told him not to touch her, and he seemingly feels as though if it weren’t for his injury, they could have made it work between them. Similarly, hundreds of p...
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Mrs. Dalloway: A Portrait of the Human Experience

  Mrs. Dalloway : A Portrait of the Human Experience Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf may seem on the surface to be a jumble of people’s experiences in a day that are rather unrelated to one another. Full of contradictions and complicated subplots, it can be easy to view the novel this way. However, I’d like to argue that Woolf uses this novel to paint a portrait of Clarissa’s and human experiences in general. The book is not merely a story to read for pleasure, but an artistic representation of what it means to be human: to have regrets, jealousy, surface level, and deep relationships. Woolf uses different characters in the novel to represent the different aspects of a life. Nostalgia and regret are commonly repeating threads throughout Mrs. Dalloway. The two characters that Woolf uses to represent this feeling are Peter Walsh and Sally Seton. We are introduced to this past-reflection in Clarissa early on when she thinks to herself “oh if she could have lived her life over ag...
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The Mezzanine: Living in the Moment

The Mezzanine: Living in the Moment   Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine provokes many questions in the minds of its readers. One that particularly resonated with me is whether or not there was a lesson in the book’s content, intentionally placed there by the author for the readers to interpret and learn from. With the anticlimactic nature of this book, you might think that it has no overarching point at all. However, I think that Nicholson Baker is trying to teach us a lesson with his novel. He shows us that there can be great joy and enthusiasm found in living in the moment. T o prove this point, there are a few instances throughout the course of the book I’d like to highlight.    First, in several places, Baker uses defamiliarization to be enthusiastic about the mundane. In particular, he says “Perforation! Shout it out!” and goes on to describe how life- changing he finds this invention that most people find insignificant, even claiming that we should celebrate it a...
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