Similarities in the two similar novels we read

After reading both J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it is easy to see similarities and to draw a connection between the two novels, particularly with the characters of Kurtz and the Magistrate. In similar and in different ways, both characters break away from the idea of a traditional citizen by each of their society’s standards. Kurtz and the Magistrate both “go wrong,” Kurtz by means of assimilating himself with the native African way of life and embracing the nature of the jungle, and the Magistrate by questioning the practices and workings of the all-powerful Empire.

The Magistrate and Kurtz are also similar and connected to one another because they can both be considered scholars and traitors to their societies. Kurtz can be considered a traitor to the European standards because he does not act in traditional ways and has “regressed” back to barbaric and native ways that the African people live by. Kurtz falls in love with the African wilderness, which the Europeans look at with disgust, and essential loses his sanity, betraying the idea that the Europeans are better than the natives and cannot succumb to their primitive ways. Kurtz can also be considered as scholar as a result of his love of nature and interest in the African ways. Similarly, the Magistrate is a scholar, although in a much more clear and defined way. The Magistrate takes a keen interest in barbarian culture and ways, as shown by his affection for and attention given to the barbarian girl, and also desires to learn of the barbarian history, also shown through the barbarian girl. In one part of the story, the Magistrate finds himself questioning why he is so interested in the barbarian girl, and wondering if it is just because of his insatiable desire of knowledge of the barbarians. And, of course, the Magistrate is a traitor to the Empire’s and specifically Colonol Joll’s standards because of his heavy interaction with the barbarians and his dangerous sympathy towards the barbarians and their culture.

Another way in which the novels themselves are similar is the idea of an enemy featured in each novel. The Africans and the barbarians in Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, respectively, both are a “threat” to the Europeans and the Empire. Both societies portray their enemies as subhuman and at a lower level than their esteemed cultures. Both societies perpetuate the idea of fear to keep their denizens in check and to discourage questions regarding anything in their life. Overall, Waiting for the Barbarians and Heart of Darkness are curiously similar to each other.

First impressions of Waiting for Barbarians

J.M Coetzee’s novel Waiting for Barbarians made an interesting first impression on me, to say the least. The plot and the characters were both interesting, but I feel like the more important aspect of the novel which made a significant impression on me, as well as affecting the reader’s knowledge of the plot and characters, was the style of the novel. The narration of the Magistrate and the author’s constant use of the present tense in the narrative is different from any other story that we have read in this class this year, and this narrative style plays a large role in the novel as a whole. I was intrigued by this unique style of narration, but was not sure if I liked it too much. This style led to many descriptions of small details and seemingly pointless details, such as the narrator’s long, drawn-out description of himself in the bedroom with the barbarian girl. I found this whole scene rather odd, but I will trust the author and believe that there will be a point to this focusing on minute details. The style does, however, make the novel easy to read and relatively straightforward, which is the kind of novel that I like to read

This style also affects my interpretations of the characters in Waiting for Barbarians. Through the narration, I found myself able to learn about the personality of the Magistrate. The narrator seems to be, overall, a good person. He appears to be someone who is genuine and moralistic with good intentions. Another character in the novel that is described is Colonel Joll. What is interesting about this character is the fact that he is the only to this point to be named. The Colonel appears to be a representation of evil in the novel, of the negative rule of the Empire that is prevalent throughout. A third character who I decided merited discussion in my blog was the barbarian girl that the Magistrate had a relationship with. I found her to be a strange character but a useful one for her role in the novel.

Overall, I would say that I am enjoying the novel, in large part to the fascinating overarching plot of the Empire and the barbarians with the side plot of the Magistrate. I am looking forward to continuing the novel. (389)

Alan Simmons' on Conrad, Casement, and the Congo Atrocities

--Both Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement were profoundly influenced by their time spend in the Congo Free State

--Casement and Conrad were friendly towards each other, both spoke very respectfully of one another and expressed pleasure regarding their acquaintance

--Both spoke of the horrors and atrocities of the Congo but went about it in different ways and for different reasons, both mutually detested the atrocities

--Inconsistencies in the works and letters of both Conrad and Casement, especially regarding the degree of “mutilations” that each person witnessed in the Congo

--Questioning of Conrad’s basis for some parts of “Heart of Darkness,” big question on whether parts where drawn from Conrad’s own experiences or simply from reports and rumors of atrocities in the Congo

--“Profound change in [Casement’s] attitude towards the Africans,” how Casement’s attitude and sympathy towards the plight of the natives grew and changed

--Casement’s leadership in the Congo Reform Association, the developing of it, how he used Conrad, Conrad’s letters, and “Heart of Darkness” to help the cause and the important role of Conrad

--The general importance of “Heart of Darkness” as a story and what it meant

--The language of atrocity; how Conrad and Casement went about describing the “unspeakable actions” in different ways, questioning how one even talks about atrocities, how the innate shock and disbelief of stories from the Congo comes from lack of context to draw from in Europe

Closure in The Sound and the Fury

The final section of The Sound and the Fury provides significant closure to the novel because it shows the story of the Compson family coming full circle and definitively highlights the problems of the unfortunate family. These two points are especially evident in the final scene of the novel. As we discussed in class, the story ends in chaos: Jason is angrily fuming at Luster, Luster is confused and overwhelmed, Benjy is wailing and upset, mother is at home, Lady Quentin has run away, most likely with a boy, and no one is sure where she is, the reader still is unsure about the condition of Caddy, and Quentin, Father, and Damuddy are all dead. All of these things provide an excellent snapshot of the ridiculous amount of collective problems that the Compson family has. This highlighting of problems provides closure to the novel because it is consistent with a running theme of the novel, the “tragedy” of the Compson family and all of the family’s imperfections and issues. The last section and scene of The Sound and the Fury also provides closure by having the novel essentially end where it started: Benjy and Luster together, as well and a bunch of unanswered questions. (204)

Tragedy in The Sound and the Fury

Wadlington, Warwick. “The Sound and the Fury: A Logic of Tragedy.” American Literature, Vol. 53, No. 3. Duke University Press, Nov. 1981 (p 409-423).

For my scholarly article about William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I chose an interesting and incredibly confusing article that discussed in what ways the novel is a tragedy and also the dichotomous nature of the novel. Wadlington uses the character Quentin as the basis for his argument of the novel as a tragedy; if he can show and highlight the tragic elements of Quentin, a central character to the novel, then he can effectively argue of the whole novel’s status as a tragedy. Near the beginning of his article, Wadlington attempts to point out the difference between pathos and tragedy, and ultimately prove to the reader of his article that The Sound and the Fury is the latter as opposed to the former.

Wadlington highlights the suffering of Quentin—and indeed the entire Compson family—as well as his deep passion as reasons for his story to be considered a tragedy. Wadlington crafts a very convincing argument by recognizing counter arguments to his thesis and explaining reasons why they can be overlooked or by proving the counter argument to be false. Two specific counter arguments that Wadlington notes are the lack of tragic closure in the novel as well as Quentin’s failure to be a heroic figure. After he had laid out his thesis, Wadlington stated that “the absence of tragic closure in the novel, then, does not stem from a view that there can be no momentous catastrophe in a modern ‘everyday’ world for reasons unrelated to the tragic process,” and also saying that “the tragic heroic crisis must also eventuate in devastating everydayness.” (413). In this first line, I believe that Wadlington is trying to show how the setting and format of the novel—a novel about basic events of a family’s history in a modern (relative to Faulkner’s writing) time—explains the lack of tragic closure and excuses it. Waldington also later commends Faulkner for his ability to overcome his novel’s inherent flaws and to make his story a good and modern tragedy. In the second quote about the “tragic heroic crisis,” Waldington again uses the status of “everydayness” to cover up for the lack of heroic qualities of the novel, of which tragedies usually rely heavily upon.

Another interesting point that Waldington makes that manages to stand out from all of the other evidence is the dichotomous nature of the novel and the absolute thinking that is present in many of the characters. Waldington uses Benji and the first scene in the novel to illustrate his point; he comments that “to be immersed into Benjy’s perspective, which reduces everything to an unqualified opposition (Caddy and not-Caddy), is our proper introduction to the Compson experience of life. As in the novel’s first scene, the mental landscape is without middle ground or nuance—there is only this side of the fence or that side of the fence.” (414). Indeed, this way of thinking in the Compson household is prevalent throughout the novel. Mrs. Compson, for example, sees things as either Compson or Bascomb, and makes a clear distinction between the two, shown in her occasional statements that her favorite son Jason is more a Bascomb than a Compson. The mother’s thinking also affects Quentin: he believes that from his mother he will either receive a strong feeling of maternal love or utter abandonment, and unfortunately for him he feels the latter due to mother’s favoritism of Jason.

Overall, Waldington’s article was a good read, but personally for me very confusing and at times frustrating. A lot of the language went over my head, and I fear that at times I completely missed the point of what he was trying to say. Maybe it was my confusion that caused me not to be convinced of Waldington’s overarching point that the novel is a tragedy. Personally, I do not consider the novel a tragedy, but I cannot truly back up this claim, considering that at this point I’m not too sure what to consider the novel. (692 words)

Mothers and Daughters

“The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.” This quote by Anna Quindlen is very representative of the mother, who is also the narrator, in Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing.” The story is short but the writing in it is very dense, and Olsen gives the ready many facts and details useful for analyzing the journey through motherhood that the narrator takes. “I Stand Here Ironing” investigates the intricacies of the mother-daughter relationship, while also exploring the nature of motherhood and highlighting the plight of a working class woman who has five children.

The relationship between the narrator and her daughter Emily is the driving force behind the story. The mother struggles not only in raising her child, but also with her own thoughts and her poverty. As a young, nineteen year old single working mother of a newborn baby in “the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression” (9), the narrator has a very difficult time supporting herself and her baby financially. She tried everything she could to spend as much time with Emily while also making enough money to survive. The narrator describes Emily as a “miracle to [her]” and is absolutely crushed when she has to leave her eight month old baby during the daytimes with a lady “to whom [Emily] was no miracle at all” (8). The narrator certainly possessed an abundance of love for her daughter and nursed her “with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood” (6). Unfortunately for her, thanks to her poverty and the desertion of her husband when the baby was one, the mother had to send her baby to her inconsiderate husband for a year. This would not be the only time in the story that the mother’s poverty and single working status would affect her relationship with her first born daughter; in fact, this problem persists throughout the entire story. Near the end of the story, after Emily’s comical talent is discovered, the mother laments about her inability to support Emily’s dreams, saying “You ought to do something about her with a gift like that—but without money or knowing how, what does one do?” (49). Throughout the story—a story with striking similarities to the author Olsen’s own life—poverty proves to be a near-insurmountable obstacle in the mother-daughter relationship.

The development and growth of shaky and awkward relationship between Emily and her mother very closely mirrors the growth of Emily as a child and a person. The effect on Emily’s life—and on her relationship with her mom—of being abandoned twice as a child cannot be overlooked. At the tender young age of one, during the formative years of the mother-daughter relationship, Emily was sent to live with her deserter father for roughly a year’s time. When Emily returns at the age of two, her mother feels like she “hardly knew” her own daughter who now was “walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father thin… all the baby loveliness gone” (11). In a way, one could argue that the narrator’s daughter was no longer the young sweet baby that she loved, but rather was something different, something alien to her that she could never again fully connect with in a maternal way. As the daughter begins to age, she desires her mother’s attention, but doesn’t receive it to the extent she would like to. This is due in large part to the mother’s work that she has to take on, and she is simply unable to provide the full amount of attention that her daughter deserves. This is just one of many things that the mother regrets in her upbringing of her daughter. Throughout the story, there are countless examples of regret that the mom feels regarding her raising of her daughter, and it goes past the point of pitiful to the point of annoyance for the reader to hear a narrator whine and pity herself so much. Also mixed in with the heavy feeling of regret are excuses for the mother’s behavior, justifications for her actions, and self-assurances. After being told that she needed to smile at her daughter more, the narrator, after initially questioning herself and regretting her facial expressions towards her young daughter, attempts to appease herself by saying “I loved her. There were all the acts of love” (17).

This statement of love must be true: it obviously was a clear sign of love when the narrator abandoned her seven-year old daughter for a second time by sending her to a convalescent home, placing priority of another young daughter over Emily, and effectively shattering any hopes of creating or reclaiming a loving relationship with her oldest daughter. One crucial point of the story that may get overlooked is the author’s use of the word “love” to describe a childish crush Emily had on a boy. This stealthy paragraph is significant for two main reasons. First, the use of the word love may represent the foreignness of the meaning of love to her, if it is being used to describe her feelings for a prepubescent boy. And second, after Emily gives a long explanation of her rejection by the boy (something that Emily perceives her mother did to her) and ends by asking “Why, Mommy?” (36), she receives no answer from the mother, representing a disconnection on an emotional as well as a communicational level. The story of the development, or stunting, of the critical mother-daughter relationship is what makes this story by Tillie Olsen so fascinating and meaningful. (951)

A Token Scholarship

This week, I wanted to continue discussing a question posed in class on Tuesday regarding Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal,” as well as simply discussing other related aspects of the story. The question that we talked about in class is whether or not our protagonist would have received his scholarship to the “state college for Negroes” (101) if he hadn’t gone through with all of the antics and charades that the white men put him through at the “gathering of the town’s leading white citizens” (3)? The answer to this question, I believe, is a simple no, but there is much to be discussed regarding this question and this story.

I think that the protagonist received his scholarship as a sort of reward for his good behavior in his life leading up to the point of the gathering and as a reward for his cooperation with the white man’s wishes at the gathering. The narrator described how he was an “example of desirable conduct” (3), and how after a speech at his graduation “everyone praised [him]” (3). These examples of good behavior are part of the reason why he received his scholarship, but ultimately it came down to his entertainment that he provided for the “big shots” (5). The narrator’s reason for going to the gathering was that he believed he was to deliver his speech in front of a large crowd of influential people. Just by itself, the speech can be viewed as a laudable action by the narrator which would support his receiving of a scholarship. However, it is very clear that the speech was never the reason the narrator was invited to the gathering. The fighting, scrambling for money, and “hilarious” entertainment were the true reasons for his presence at the gathering. So why did the narrator go through with it? Certainly he did not know that he would receive a scholarship to a state school for his actions; he only believed that he would be able to deliver his speech at the end of the proceedings. It was not even guaranteed that he would give his speech, but he was allowed to, partly out of pity and another slight reward for his previous actions, but mostly for the potential entertainment value of a black man trying to give a speech to a bunch of big-shot white men who really did not care about what he would be discussing. Through all this, though, the narrator went through with the “battle royal” (4) to follow through with his grandfather’s advice that he should “overcome ‘em with yeses” and “agree ‘em to death and destruction,” with the “them” being the white man (2). The narrator realizes the limited opportunities he has to advance himself in a white-controlled world, and he is willing to do all that he can to achieve greatness.

A corollary to the initial question is why did they big-shots even give the narrator a scholarship in the first place? The scholarship was mostly given as a token reward to a black man who didn’t ask questions, did what we was supposed to, and provided them with a night of good entertainment. The narrator’s propensity to acquiesce to the white man can be seen when he retracts his comment about “social equality” (82). The M.C. then says to the narrator that “you’ve got to know your place at all times” (92), his place of course being subservient to the white man. And a final reason for the scholarship is stated in the narrators dream, to “keep this nigger-boy running” (106) As a major point of the entire story, the white man simply is looking for ways to keep the black man running around and not doing anything that would threaten the established way of life. (627)

Foreshadowing in "A Good Man"

In Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor successfully uses the literary technique of foreshadowing to enhance and to support her story. Although O’Connor frequently uses foreshadowing, she is able to mask its overwhelming presence in the story through her crafty use of irony and humor. Right at the beginning of the story, O’Connor foreshadows the family’s encounter with The Misfit. While trying to convince her son Bailey for the family to travel to east Tennessee instead of Florida, the grandmother angrily says, “I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (1). Already, in the first paragraph of the story, O’Connor is able to plant the possibility, or likelihood, of an encounter with the Misfit in the reader’s mind. This quote also is a perfect example of O’Connor’s subtle use of irony. Looking back at these two lines when the events of the story are known already, it is fairly obvious to see the irony in the grandmother’s words. Although she claims that she wouldn’t take her children near a criminal, it is her fault that her family crossed paths with the Misfit because of her desire to see a nonexistent house.

O’Connor continues with her early prefiguring of the encounter with the Misfit in dialogue between the grandmother and her grandson, John Wesley. When the grandmother asks John what he would do if he was caught by the Misfit, he bravely replies, “I’d smack his face” (6). This is yet another calculated effort by the author to reference the meeting with the Misfit, but again O’Connor uses humor and irony to partially diverge the reader from this sign of the future. The humorous part of this statement is that a young boy, John, claims that he would smack the face of a full-grown escaped angry convict. It is also funny and ironic that once the Misfit is identified, John Wesley is very quiet and subdued, and instead of smacking the Misfit he joins his family who was “huddled together in front of [the Misfit]” (90).

John Wesley is also the source of another instance of foreshadowing later in the story. Once the family has crashed their car and met the unidentified strangers, John pryingly asks one of the strangers “What you got that gun for? Whatcha gonna do with the gun?” (78) As a matter of fact, that man is going to kill you with that gun, John. O’Connor foreshadows the use of the gun through John’s questioning, but again, is able almost sneak it in without making it too apparent. Through O’Connor’s earlier characterization of John Wesley as an annoying, loud, and curious young boy, she is able to make the reader believe that this was just a typical childish question by an immature and nosy boy. And again, knowing the outcome of the story, it is ironic that John is asking the man who is going to kill him what he is doing with a gun.

These aforementioned examples of foreshadowing are surely not the only ones in the story, and with an abundance of time it would be easy to spot and discuss many more examples. Still, through her wonderful and effective use of foreshadowing, Flannery O’Connor is able to make her story fun and interesting to read and analyze. (565)