Hurston

I thought of this as a coming of age story. The main character, John, really wanted to go out to sea and see everything that his father wasn’t able to because he was stuck there in Florida.  John talked about it his entire life, starting when he was just a small boy and continued talking about it into adulthood.

The mother, Matty, is a huge hindrance to John. I understand a mother’s need to keep their children near but by keeping him at home I think that she indirectly killed him. When John reached adulthood he stayed because she wouldn’t give her approval and he kept saying one more year for her to get used to the idea of his leaving. Then once he married Stella he still wanted to leave and go to sea, even though he now had a wife to support. Stella was a second voice that was keeping John where he was, she didn’t want him to leave.

John knew that it was his destiny to go to sea but not in the way that he finally did. John had an opportunity to go into the Navy and see the world as he has wanted for years but when he told his wife and mother his mother told him that if he left he shouldn’t ever come back because he would no longer be her child. This made him stay once again but I think this was the fatal flaw for this character. Because this was shortly before he was asked to help with the bridge before a strong storm came through.

John went to help with this bridge and told his father to stay behind because it would be too difficult for him. While they were working the storm arrived and John was one of the few that didn’t survive. When he was seen and was known to dead his father told the rescuers to let him float out to sea because that is where he had wanted to go. John did get to go out to sea but not as he expected.

Frost

Home Burial

As I read this poem it really surprised me that a man had written it. I think as the woman did that a man couldn’t understand a woman’s loss of a baby. After carrying a child for 9 months then to lose it would be un-bearable. The man in the poem was trying to be understanding for his wife but it wasn’t really coming through. He obviously loved his wife and wanted things to be as they were before but couldn’t understand that she needed more time to mourn.  She was apparently the type of person that doesn’t want to talk about the things that bother her where he seems to be the type of person that needs to talk about it. She was so deeply wounded by her loss that she also couldn’t understand how he could talk to people about other things on the same day that they buried their child.

The Road Not Taken

I have heard this saying for years but never knew that it came from a poem by Frost. I really liked it. The meaning is clear and shows how people never know where the road will take you until you make the decision to take that road. You can always take the same road as everyone else and never be worse for wear but then you can take the road that not that many people are taking and end up so much better off.

Fire and Ice

I liked this poem because it gives an opinion. Fire or Ice we will never know till it happens, each will be painful for those that are living and both have the ability to heal the earth from the damages that humans have inflicted on it for the last 300 years, but which will be the end?

The Other Two

I really like “The Other Two,” I found it interesting to see the point of view of Mr. Waythorn. When he married Mrs. Waythorn he didn’t really seem to think about her two ex-husbands until they started to become part of their lives.

Mr. Haskett was depicted as a terrible person to me at the first mention. Then once he starts to show up in the story he doesn’t seem that bad. He just wants to have a part in his daughters live and wants to see that she has the proper up bringing for her station. Mr. Waythorn though he doesn’t seem to agree that the governess which was currently tending to Lily wasn’t good enough he still fired her when Mr. Haskett asked. The fact that Mr. Haskett was coming into Mr. Waythorn’s house seemed to be Mr. Waythorn’s biggest issue with the situation.

Then there is Mr. Varick was the second ex-husband of Mrs. Waythorn, which Mr. Waythorn didn’t really have a problem with but was uncomfortable with associating with him at first after marrying his ex-wife. They seem to work through any issues there was with the comfort zone when Mr. Waythorn’s partner became sick with the gout and Mr. Waythorn had to take care of Mr. Varick’s account. It seemed that it was going to be an issue when by chance Mrs. Waythorn was speaking to Mr. Varick at a function and Mr. Waythorn was uncomfortable about it until she explained that she thought that it would be better for her to speak to him than to ignore him and walk away. By the end of the story society had even started to invite them to the same parties

The last page was interesting when they all seemed to end up in the library by accident. This seemed to show the best outcome possible when a woman from the early 20^th century has two ex-husbands.

The Open Boat

I was not impressed with the Open Boat. This short story could have been much shorter. I did find interesting the quote “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am  going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand the trees?” This was repeated a few pages later but why did the author make this into such importance to be repeated. Because they are trying to make it out of their situation alive shouldn’t they be praying to which ever gods they think would help them most? Not belittling them like they start doing.

I didn’t really understand what happened to the people on shore that saw them did they get too far way or did they just leave the beach?

Then they are talking about pie, of all things pie I understand that they were hungry but talking about it would just make it worse. I believe that this was based off a real experience the author had on a trip to Cuba but I believe that he just put too much into it.

In the end they reach land once again but they knew that they wouldn’t be able to get the boat there so they got the boat as far as they could then when it capsized they swam the rest of the way.

Stephen Crane Poetry

In the Desert

“In the Desert” was very interesting it was like someone’s nightmare in a poem. I thought that he did a very good job describing the creature that was eating his own heart. I think that it was saying something about the creature since he said that his heart was bitter so to me it tells me that he was a bitter creature in everything that he did.

Supposing that I Should Have the Courage

I think that the author is trying to infer what the payment for being virtuous should be. He questions what he will get for being stabbed with the “sword of virtue.” He asks about a castle or a kingdom but when he finds out that hope would be the only reward then he is ready to be stabbed. This shows what kind of man the author was he is saying that having hope is the best reward there is even if it is for being virtuous.

A Man Feared that He Might Find an Assassin

This short poem was very interesting to me. These two men both feared opposite things so in saying that they both feared to meet each other.  The last line leaves the reader questioning who is the wiser of the two. I think that the one fearing to find a victim is the wiser because there are so many people could be the victim but there are not as many people have the evilness to be the assassin.

Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind

This poem is giving the wrong impression. War is in no way kind. This poem is telling maidens that war is kind that it killed your lover but war is still kind???? Whatever! Don’t weep war is kind we just kill the young men. It continues to tell both babies and mothers that war is kind and that their father or sons were killed but war is still kind. It is such a misconception in that it is lying to these people that war is a good thing.

The Awakening by Chopin

It was only after the first 40 pages that I finally arrived at the conclusion that this was a story about a woman finding her freedom. I feel like Mrs. Pontellier has always done what has been expected of her and never thought for herself. There always was her father there to make any decisions for her then she married and her husband made all the decisions.

She is a mother but she doesn’t seem much like a mommy, she seems to love her children but isn’t the always there mommy. Mrs. Pontellier’s character seems to me an example of how many women would have been like back then because girls were never allowed to think for themselves and pushed to marry at an early age before they really had been able to find out her they were.

Mrs. Pontellier’s affair with Alcee Arobin was her final step to her awakening of her self. She had just done what was expected of her that with Robert spending so much time with her and finally having to make some of her own decisions while out on the island for the summer without her husband she saw that there was more to her than just the dutiful wife and mother that she wanted so much more. Though she did ill fatedly fall in “love” with Robert, it only served to help her see herself.

I don’t think that she was knowingly planning to kill herself when she swam so far out, but underneath she was tired of this world and didn’t want to live in it without Robert.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I think that Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” would be an excellent story to tell around Halloween.  Her characters slow spiral into complete insanity was thrilling. I think that she really pulled from her experiences while she was going through her own depression.  

Jane, the main character, really didn’t seem that sick at the beginning of the story. It sounded to me that she was going through at normal bout of post-partum-depression, which would have been treated with medication now. John, her husband/doctor, is treating her how they treated these types of issues in that day. I don’t agree with how he took her out into the country and isolated her but if he really believed that would be the best thing for her maybe he should have stayed with her. This also makes me think that Gilman may have been treated in this manner as well when she was “sick.”

The yellow wallpaper was what Jane focused on since she was made to spend so much time in her room. She was made to take an hours nap after every meal and to sleep in there at night. This in my opinion was one of the things that made her condition worse. She just kept staring at that yellow wallpaper and started to see things in it until it became an obsession. Then discovered what she thought was a woman trying to break out of the paper. This, to me, was symbolizing her trying to break out of the depression. Though quickly her hallucinations get worse when she starts to see the woman “creeping” around outside during the day. It’s like she sees herself as she is moving around during the day, though she does say the woman hides when a carriage comes.

This continues until the last day that they were going to be living in that house and John wasn’t coming home. During that night she started ripping all the paper off the walls trying to help the woman escape her trappings. When Jennie, her husband’s sister, came to see her in the morning she had most of the paper off and Jane convinced her to allow her to stay in the room to “sleep.” Jane not wanting to be disturbed locked the door and through the key out the window.

Then I noticed that it says “I” but then has Jane as one of the subjects so I think that her depression had gotten so bad that she had developed schizophrenia and the “woman in the wall” was the second personality that finally took over when she peeled the paper off.  I didn’t quite understand what she did with her “well hidden rope” but I think that she used it to kill her husband so that she (personality #2) couldn’t be suppressed again.  I could be really off with my analysis.

Bierce: Obsessed with Death

The author’s obsession with death is evident in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  I really had thought that Peyton Farquhar had managed to get away from the solders. Though a Yankee myself I have always preferred the characters in stories that are on the Southern side of the Civil War. I feel like the North had somehow provoked Farquhar into whatever he did to be hanged for. The North had sent a scout out into Southern territory to ask about, and then the scout tells Farquhar about a great quantity of drift wood at the bridge that would go up in flames quickly. Telling Farquhar, a southern supporter, something that would hinder the North so much is just asking him to go out and set it on fire. That was a trap and I don’t think that is fair to Farquhar. Farquhar seemed to only do whatever he could for the cause he believed in whole heartedly.

          When the story seems to continue with Farquhar getting away and returning home was told so vividly that it was believable that he really did get away. Until he is roaming through the woods without any sign of human habitation and with “black bodies of the great trees forming a straight wall” this started giving me the idea that he didn’t really make it but more was his death walk. This was really just his spirit going home to his wife and not his physical body returning to her. It was like he didn’t know that he had died so his spirit went home just like he wanted to.

Daisy Miller

I was surprised to find that Daisy Miller: A Study had a moral to it. I was expecting from the first few pages to be a complete fluff story. Mr. Winterbourne needs some socialization; he seemed to have spent way too much time in the company of older people and doesn’t know how to handle people his own age. I think that if he had known how to handle Miss Miller this story would not have unfolded in this manner.

                Having contact with people from other countries for many years I have heard often how wild and outspoken young Americans are compared to the cultures my friends have come from and even though this is set a hundred and some years earlier the same stands true here as well. Miss Miller though part of the upper crust in society she is outspoken almost to the point of being brazen. She dares not to listen to the rules of polite society and faces the consequences. She doesn’t find it an issue to be seen un-chaperoned with an unwed man.   This is common now but in the 1800’s this was a fast way to ruin a young lady’s reputation. 

                The moral seems to be that following the rules of society is imperative to life. Miss Miller pushes her luck when she starts to spend way too much time with Mr. Giovanelli. He monopolizes her time and since he is not part of the main stream society that she is this is looked down upon. He also doesn’t follow the rule of the society of the time, allowing her to get him to take her out after dark. When they are found at the Coliseum at midnight is where fate steps in and she become sick with Roman fever. This ultimately kills her but not before she admits that if Mr. Winterbourne had know how to handle her she would have loved him.

Howells

This was another sad story. I couldn’t imagine tell a man that if he didn’t go to war I couldn’t be with him. Those would have to some very strong patriotic feeling that she had to have to put her country in front of her fiancé. Though he did make his decision on his own before she ended things with him the letter that she wrote very well could have pushed him into doing something rash and could have been what got him killed.

 I believe that Mrs. Gearson had the right ideas about war but that comes from living through a war. We don’t understand how bad war can be because there has been a war in the US since the Civil War. We have never had to live in constant fear that the enemy could come crashing through our door at any moment. That is the memory of war that Mrs. Gearson didn’t want his son to see and didn’t want her son to be involved with. War in those days was a very personal thing, you had to be close enough to the enemy to see their faces and that could be a very hard thing to live with knowing the face of every person that you killed in war. That is not something a mother wants for their child.

I completely agree with how the mother acted when Editha come to see her. Editha had urged her son to join an army on its way to war, against everything that she had taught him. Then she gave him a letter that very well could have pushed her son to do something that could have gotten him killed just so Editha would be proud of him and wouldn’t end their engagement because he wasn’t patriotic enough. If I had been in Mrs. Gearson’s shoes I would have done the same thing when Editha had come to my house. War is war and there will always be young women and men that see it as a romantic and patriotic thing to support it and there has to be someone to fight the battles and protect the innocent but as a mother there is not harder loss as losing your child. Then to have the woman that was pushing your son to go off to war and get killed that would have been one of the hardest meetings ever.

Harris

How Mr. Rabbit was too sharp for Mr. Fox

I have always thought that the fox is supposed to be the sly one but somehow the rabbit in this story is able to outsmart him.  Maybe the moral of this story is that maybe the typical is not always the truth. Then there is also maybe even if someone says that is not what they want the truth could be they are repeating it so that you will do just that. Which in this case was exactly what the rabbit wanted.

Free Joe and the Rest of the World

I found this story to be sad. You would think that every slave just wanted to be free but freedom was the worst thing to happen to Free Joe. Free Joe seemed that he had a fairly good life as a slave but when he had been freed he had to find a way to support himself and still be able to see his wife that was still a slave. He seemed to just about anything to be close to his wife even though his wife’s owner would allow him to see her. He would sit in the woods near the plantation that his wife was working on under a big tree and listen to the slaves sing in the evening. His little dog would go and fetch his wife that would come and sit with him. But once his wife was taken where he wasn’t able to see her and his little dog had been killed I don’t think that Joe thought that he had anything to live for. He just sat there and it was like he willed himself to die because he no longer had anything to live for, he had lost everthing that was important to him.

Jewett

                I liked that there was so much more to the characters in this story compared to “The New England Nun.”  “A White Heron” I loved the little girl, Sylvia. She was the typical little girl that loves animals. I also liked the depth of the grandmother and the hunter.

                Sylvia being from the “town” now in the country where she can roam around of course loves it. She never wants to leave it, and even enjoys the game of “hide and seek” that she plays with the cow. When the hunter shows up it become obvious that she had been abused by a man while she lived in town, which the author does explain about boy that would chase her.  I liked how later on she gets a childhood crush on the hunter.  Also, it would have to be a little girl as the main character in this story because I could see anyone else going to the lengths that he little girl did to find the white heron but then not telling the hunter.

                The grandmother at first seemed like she wouldn’t have that much of a personality until she started to tell the hunter about her children and how she has buried most of them. She really seemed like a sad woman and mostly has Sylvia there for companion ship more than anything. She doesn’t seem like she needs Sylvia there to do the work for her.

                Then there is this hunter, he talks about how he has all these birds at home stuffed in his collection but there he is without anything. He is staying with them; he doesn’t seem to have any money or food with him, just his gun. This doesn’t seem realistic. If he could afford to have these birds stuffed and hunt so much what kind of job does he have and back then who received vacation time? He seems like a questionable character but he does have some depth. He loves to hunt and seems well mannered he said that the meal the grandmother prepared was the best he had in a month. It makes me think that he was lying about having all those animals stuffed at home but maybe he was trying to get it for a rich man that wanted one stuffed.

                Even with the inconstancies of the hunter it liked the story.

Freeman

I really like A New England Nun, though I thought that it could have had more feeling in it. All of the characters in the story sound as if they are cut off from their own feelings.  Louisa was such an OCD character but her only feelings were about her things and her way of doing things and not about the man that she was getting ready to marry after 15 years of engagement. Also Joe and Lily didn’t seem to show any feelings when they were talking to each other.  Though this is a short story it wouldn’t have taken that much more space to make these characters less shallow.  

Louisa dwelled more on what she was going to change in her daily routine than the fact that after 15 years she was finally going to be able to marry her fiancé. It upset her more that he moved the books around on the table and left dirt on her floor than it did that he went to Australia for 14 years. While she was thinking about things she was troubled that she wouldn’t be able to rip out stitches just to re-sew them for the pleasure of it, and she was worried that she would be able to use her still to distill her plants from her garden. This doesn’t sound like a woman getting ready to marry the man she loves. 

                Joe and Lily’s characters felt empty as well. When they were sitting on the wall talking they didn’t seem to show much feeling, even though I thought that they were supposed to be in love and saying good bye since Lily was leaving so she didn’t have to watch him marry another woman. Even in that time they might not have touched but there should have been more feeling in their words.

                Even though the characters seem to be very shallow, feeling less people things seemed to work out for the best for everyone. Joe and Louisa would never been happy married to someone they didn’t love and Lily would have been a very unhappy old maid.

Dickenson

Emily Dickenson was an interesting person, even though at the time she was thought to be a recluse.  She stayed at home most of the time due to reoccurring sicknesses. (I don’t remember the exact reference to this, but found this information for a paper I did in Eng 113, for Mr. Reynolds.) Much of her poetry was about death which would be a constant thought for her since she was so often sick.

                In Poem #449 she is writing as if she had died and was laid to rest next to someone that died in pursuit of the truth. Though I think she was saying that truth and beauty are the same and because she died for beauty and he died for truth they are “bretheren” and therefore they met that night as kinsmen, though their only relationship was by dying from the same thing.

                Poem # 712 I found to be very interesting. It was as if she was writing to Death that she wasn’t ready for him to come just yet.  She seemed not ready to stop writing and binding her poetry so in this poem Death stopped for her.  Death then took her through some symbolism of her life, the school and children is the symbol of her childhood. Then the “Fields of Gazing Grain-” was her adult life and the setting sun was the symbol of the end of her life, because the setting sun is the end of the day. They then stop before a house with the roof that was hard to see and the corner in the ground, a mausoleum, her final resting place. The end of this poem gives the idea that once you die time passes much more quickly than it does when you’re alive, because she said centuries had passed yet it only felt like it had been a day.

                Not in reference to death I also liked poem # 764 which was like an ode to the sun set and the end of the day. She writes about how the shadow indicates the end of the day and sun going down.

Huck Finn

I found “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” mostly uninteresting. It took me more than 2 weeks to read half of it, I kept falling asleep. The story lines where so outrageous that they weren’t believable. I know that these were to be stories for children but my son wouldn’t pay attention either. 

The outrageous bit about Tom and Huck starting a “gang” whose line of business was “Nothing only robbery and murder” showed how ignorant these boys were supposed to be. Though with Huck going to school he should have known what ransom was.  Tom imagining everything while everyone else thought that they were really going to be a “gang” kept the story somewhat interesting at that point.

When Huck and Jim get separated and Huck lives with the Grangerford’s, and they were talking about the feud between them and the Shepherdson’s reminded me of the Hatfield and the McCoy feud. That was an interesting theme, Twain managed to put in an obscure reference to Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” with Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepherdson running away together like Romeo and Juliet would have liked to. Both had feuding families and both fell in love against their family’s wishes. The big difference would be that in Romeo and Juliet they killed themselves and here Sophia and Harney got away and their families killed each other.

The story line about the “Duke” and “King” was just a bit over the top. I was glad that Twain didn’t have Huck believe them about their supposed misfortunes. To have Jim believe these two fakes was a bit much for me; he was supposed to be intelligent for a slave. Though their cheating ways did help Huck and Jim financially for a bit it was still a little much for me to swallow, and didn’t make an enjoyable read for me.

Try Again at an Introduction

I am a single mother of a 3 and a half year old son, Nevon. I took the first half of this class in the fall as a seated class, then didn't have this half at a time I could take. I am an advid reader and have started reading James Patterson over the winter break. I really like his charactor Alex Cross. I hope to enjoy this class and do well.