I have learned a lot. Mostly about Gothic elements and the different types of Gothic stories, but they have all been beneficial. One of the things I love about reading short stories like these is I can dissect every aspect of it and it all mean something. In a novel, there can be things that just don’t have any meaning and I don’t like that. In short stories, everything has to have meaning to make the story work. I hope we continue to learn elements of literary styles, maybe go in to some Romantic pieces. I covered Romanticism in my junior English class and I loved them. Even writing with a romantic style was extremely easy to me. Research papers have never really been a problem to me; I love the research aspect of it and finding information. Overall, I like the class and am learning a lot from it, and hope that continues throughout the rest of the semester.
Blog Four Week 7
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 and spent his childhood years in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway displayed a talent for writing from a young age. He actually published his first piece of literature at seventeen. His father wanted him to go to college after high school, but Hemingway wanted to either enter the army or become a writer. When his father would not let him enlist, Hemingway left home and began writing for the Kansas City Star. He began to focus on his writing style in his years as a reporter. The editors for the newspaper wanted him to write short sentences without too much negative context to deliver the facts in his articles. Although he was successful, He struggles with drinking and depression most of his life. He died in the summer of 1961 from a gunshot wound he gave himself at age 61.
Hemingway is a master of dialogue in that he doesn’t necessarily recreate how characters speak, but rather his use of repetition. It makes the reader understand what is going on and helps the reader remember what is said.
To me, because the story was almost strictly dialogue after the description of the setting, it was hard to follow with who was saying what. Not necessarily that I did not know what was being said, it was just hard knowing who said what in my opinion. So because of that, I had to research what was the story about and all the other stuff in order to understand it and it’s a beautiful piece. Displays how one event can utterly change a relationship, and shows how dependent a person can be to someone else for acceptance and love.
Two symbols I saw in the story was: One, her saying that the hills looked like white elephants. White elephants are something that noone wants. So her saying that the hills look like white elephants means that whatever is on her mind right now, the operation (which i believe is an abortion), so consumes her that she doesn’t want to lose the baby for fear of losing the American. She later says that the hills don’t look like white elephants, possibly meaning she wants the baby. The other symbol I saw is that she could not order anything at the bar without going through the American because she did not understand Spanish. This symbolizes her dependence on him and could possibly show that she can not do anything without him beside her.
Blog 3 Week 6
To me, the two pieces of foreshadowing in the story would be when the grandmother mentioned The Misfit to her son. Almost all of the time, if a narrator mentions a certain person, evil or not, somehow in the story they will run into that person. The other piece of foreshadowing I found was the part where he was falsely accused of killing his father. He had to have been a little suspicious or done something to make him suspicious to do that and so I think that is what foreshadows the whole family’s fate. It was not necessarily him that killed them, but it was the people that he controlled. I liked the story. To me, it started out as an all-american story. The whole family is going to vacation at a nice place in Florida, but the grandmother, doing what grandparents do, takes precaution because there is a criminal heading towards Florida also. Grandmothers always seem to be a little more careful than most, and so the family brushes it off as almost impossible to happen. Also the fact that the grandmother refers to Jesus when she heard the gunshot killing Bailey almost seals the fact that she knew her fate, and was trying to change it any way she knew she could, with the only thing that changed her life. She hoped that the criminal would come to realization that he was wrong but his heart was hardened. I believe that it is an appropriate ending, but to me it wasn’t likeable. It’s obvious that by the last sentence in the story that The Misfit regretted shooting her, but to him it had to be done. He said it’s no real pleasure in life”, which I think could be open for interpretation.
Week 4 blog
The Edgar Allan Poe story that I preferred was The Tell-Tale Heart. Just like in the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator of the story was insane. He stated that he could “hear all things in the heaven and in the earth”. There was an old man who the narrator crept on. He said that he loved the old man, and that he never did any harm to him. But there was one thing that he did not like. It was his eye. I think that just like the yellow wallpaper, overall the characters loved the house/person, but there was one thing that drove them crazy. He watched the old man sleep for a week before he killed him (yet he still claimed sanity). But there was one night that the man woke up because the narrator made a mistake in keeping quiet. All of a sudden, the man screams and lunges toward the old man, throwing the bed over him and suffocating him. He buried him under the floor after cutting up his body, and then a knock on the door is heard. A neighbor had called the police after hearing the scream. The narrator tries to play it off as if nothing happens but eventually I believe the guilt from the murder gets to him and he confesses. To me, the thing that made this story extremely interesting was the fact that he believed people mistook madness for an over acuteness of senses. His over acuteness was hearing. But of course, when you start hearing things that other people can’t, they will call you crazy. Another thing that interested me from this story is that along with being insane, we are never given either character’s names, so even though we can never put permanent characteristics on him, we would never be able to know who he is because we are never given names.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 and had a rough childhood. His father abandoned the family after the birth of Edgar’s little sister, and his mother died of tuberculosis before Edgar turned three. He was adopted by a wealthy family and was sent to first-rate schools and he excelled in every class. He went on the University of Virginia where he ran into gambling and drinking, but still enjoyed scholastic success. He later joined the Army under the name Edgar Perry. While in the Army, he published his first poems at the age of eighteen. After a stint at West Point, Poe desired for a full-time career in literature. He wrote for many magazines, improving the content in them, but because he was sensitive to criticism and paranoid when drunk, he was either fired or left from every position he held. He later married his first cousin who was thirteen. She died at the age of twenty-four of tuberculosis. After these events, Poe’s life disintegrated. He drank more, and his self-destructive urges intensified. He died in October of 1849 of mysterious circumstances.
Week 3 blog
I really leaned more towards “A Rose for Emily” because of the closeness of family she had, and the weird love for her boyfriend she had. Although the attraction she had for Homer resulted in him dying, I found it quite beautiful. For the first time since her father past away, she was close to a man. She could NOT afford to let him leave. Ultimately, his death and preservation of his carcass was necessary for her to be satisfied. The love that she had for him is the strongest (and creepiest) I have ever heard of.
The major character was easily Emily. She was the talk of the town, and who’s house was the mysterious one. Everyone wanted to go inside of it to see what it withheld from the world. Her secret life drew many to think weird rumors about her, establishing her role as main character. The setting was also very important. As we know, her life was symbolically dead after her father past away, and the house only magnified that. The fact that the front door was almost never open, meant that life could not enter, and if there was life in it, it could not leave. Emily was holding onto the only life she could find (Homer) after her father past. The symbolism of the house plays beautifully with her life.
William Faulkner spent most of his life in Oxford Mississippi, which is where he attended the University of Mississippi. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War I, and worked for a New Orleans newspaper after the war. He wrote nearly a hundred short stories in his lifetime, and has made a huge impact on writers. He won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.
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