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.