Friday, April 21, 2006

Soldier's Home

At the end of "Soldier's Home", Krebs decides that he will take up a job in the city, but first he goes to see his little sister play in the park. I was confused as to why he chose to go see Helen and not meet with his father at his office. At first I thought it was only because he did not really want to get a job, but he was going to, but just the same he didn't want to talk to his father about it. The more I thought about it, however, I thought that maybe he was in love with his little sister. The way he feels sick when he tells his mother that he loves her does not happen when he tells Helen the same. Also, Helen calls him her "beau", and he agrees with it, and again doesn't feel sick like he has lied. I think that he goes to the park to say goodbye to the one person he really cared about before he let himself become what society expects of him.

A Rose For Emily

Although this story was confusing a lot of the time due to Faulkner's use of "stream of consciousness", I feel the end of the story really illuminates why Faulkner chose to write the rest of it the way he did. The story line sometimes seems to skip around, and time becomes somewhat confusing throughout the story, but knowing that Homer was killed helps to understand the order of events, and how they happened and why. For instance, the smell coming from Miss Emily's house makes no sense in the story unless you understand that Homer is dead inside her house. The same goes with the arsenic that Miss Emily buys. She is very nervous when buying it, and it would appear she meant to use it for something other than its true purpose, but this is not illuminated until the very end. I think Faulkner does a very good job of creating a surprising cliax at the end of the story to illumate the rest of the story.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

somewhere i have never travelled

This poem reminds me of the topic of my ALIS paper, especially the second, third, and fourth stanzas. My paper was about how the love conflicts with social life and norms, and how the strong emotions that arise from love cause people to make poor decisions in the eyes of their peers. The second and third stanzas talk about how love takes over that person's thought process, and how often when one is in love, they will do anything for their partner. This is shown when Cummings writes," or if your wish be to close me, i and/ my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,". The narrator says that he would give up his very life for his love if she but wished him to do it. Also, the fourth stanza shows the exultation of love and the idea that no other experience in the human repertoir is so great as love. This demonstrates why people become so obsessed with love and are willing to do anything for it.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

This poem confused me quite a bit. At first I thought that the narrator was talking about going to heaven with the one he loved, especially when he says,"Time to turn back and descend the stair", but somehow that idea doesn't fit into the way he talks about "the yellow fog", almost like a hound. As the poem progressed, however, I came to think differently about the poem. I thought of the narrator more as an old and wise man who has come to understand the disillusionment of mankind, but in his indecision keeps this insight to himself. In this way, the "yellow fog" transformed into the ethereal representation of that disillusionment, causing a haze to distort the true meaning of life for the women who "come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo." In the end, the man seems to come to something of a conclusion that this disillusionment is the inevitable path of life, and there is nothing his little insight can do to change that inevitability.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Nothing Gold Can Stay

In this poem, I think Robert Frost is not only talking about the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit and were cast from Eden. In class we talked about modern poems and writing dealing with disillusionment, and I think this poem is a good example of that. When people find something good in life, they see its beauty, but often times take it for granted. Almost inevitably, though, the "golden" things in life are lost sometime or another, and it often leaves people wondering how they could have taken something so great for granted. I think this shows the disillusionment of Adam and Eve as well. They took the garden of Eden for granted after a while, and thought that God would forgive them for eating the fruit. Adam forgot his warning and gave in to temptation.