Love Each Day

The passage I choose to write about for my blog can be found on pages 150-153 of “The Sound and the Fury”

It is the scene where Caddy and Quentin are down my the water talking about Caddy’s sexual activity.  They talk about how Caddy lost her virginity and how she is a promiscuous girl.  Quentin questions Caddy about the night she lost her virginity.  As the scene unfolds we see that they Quentin has a knife and he and Caddy have some sort of a suicide pact.  He plans to kill Caddy and then himself. I think he wants to do this because he is jealous of any guy that is able to have Caddy.  He wants Caddy to himself and that is it.  Quentin feel that since they can be together in life that in death they can.  The knife and the suicide pact in this scene somewhat represents Quentin’s desire to have sex with Caddy.  They way that Faulkner portrays this scene with the knife makes it sound like the two of them are talking about having sex.  The words he uses can go for either situation, suicide or sex.  Both Caddy and Quentin know that its is wrong to feel the sexual attraction between each other, yet they talk about it more than they should.   I think that this scene is a key aspect to understanding the relationship between Caddy and Quentin as well as the understanding Quentin’s suicide while he is away at school.

Well before reading the short stories that we did for class I didn’t like Hemingway’s work at all. After reading these three short stories I still do not like Hemingway. The first story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, was too long and drawn out for my liking. It was very boring and had little relevance to anything in my own life so it made it much more difficult to read. The flashbacks also did no make this task any easier. It was confusing to go from what was present day to his past sporadically. It took me a while to figure out what was going on in the second story. I had an idea but couldn’t quite get the big picture when it came to subject of the two peoples’ conversation. I do have to admit that I found myself more into this story than any other Hemingway piece I have read. The third story was the most confusing to me. I had no clue what was going on. It seemed to be a bunch of babbling put together to make no sense at all to a normal person. I still have no idea what was really going on in the diner at all.

After finishing the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald I was left in somewhat of a bewilderment. The whole time while reading this novel I was slightly confused as to the way that Fitzgerald was writing. He seemed to work around certain aspects of the story as well as have no reasoning behind the actions of his characters. However, this being the second time I have read this novel I seemed to enjoy it a little more because, I knew what was going on a little better. One scene in the novel that stood out to me very much was the description of Mrytle’s body after Daisy hit her. The description was very vivid and very real. In my imagination I saw her lifeless body just as it was described and fringed at the picture I had created. It was just like looking at in real life or in a picture. Fitzgerald described this one scene very well but, I feel that there was other scenes where more description was needed. I think that he could have used more description throughout the whole book so that us, as readers, could better understand his characters.
Another thing that stood out to me was how Nick just happened to forget that it was his birthday and then in one random sentence tells that it is. I do not believe that any normal human being can just forget their birthday. I mean, yes they maybe let it slip there mind from time to time but, once they remember I don’t think they state in such a nonchalant way. If I were to forget my birthday the moment that I remembered I would be very excited and tell al my friends. Maybe he was fearing the future and was just trying to forget about growing old but, why then would he say anything at all. Why wouldn’t he just keep it to himself.

For this week I commented on Emily’s and Rebecca’s.

What I think about when I hear “American Literature” is the great classic novels that we read in highschool. I think about all the stories, plays, and poems that we had to read that represented what we all think about America.  I think about people like Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger, two authors that everyone seems to know.  American authors representing the good old heart of America.  Then, I start to think deeper.  These two people are American Literature but, America is a mixture of cultures. I think that we need to start incorporating more cultures into out normal belief of “American Literature.”  We should expand American Literature.  It shouldn’t just be about what we think is right for and in America but, about what America is really about.