Cathedral: An Unusual Approach Towards A Common Tale

It's interesting how a new perspective can change your opinion of things, isn't it? That seems to be the main theme of Cathedral, the short story by Raymond Carver. Yeah, it's a story with certain tropes that Hollywood has overdone to death (the husband who begrudgingly spends time with someone he doesn't like for the sake of his wife; the strange man with a disability and/or troubled past who really isn't all that bad), but the new perspective on it helps make the story seem all the more vibrant. Since it was told in the first person, it's easy to get inside the narrator's head and find out what he's thinking as he grows from feeling awkward about his wife's friend from feeling totally connected. I really did enjoy this story.

Living in the Shadow of the Gulag

Gulag. That one word is enough to bring terrible, horrific images to mind for those aware of its meaning. It's interesting that even today the word is synonymous with "the most awful kind of prison imaginable", and even modern-day examples such as our own Guantanamo Bay get compared to the conditions of the harsh Gulag prisons. It's easy to slip into the thinking that we're far beyond this now, that we've become too "civilized" to enact such atrocities, but it does still happen. Solzhenitsyn's novel really had me asking myself one big question in particular: have we really come all that far? Is it truly okay to impose unthinkable prison conditions on other humans simply because they believe something other than what we do?

Of course not. We're civilized now.

Active Reading - Chapter 29

We'd read a passage in our Backpack Literature textbook on active reading, and while it was admittedly dry (it is a textbook, after all), I feel like it was somewhat informative. I've already been doing a lot of these procedures and I often feel like digging too far into something can tend to strip the soul and meaning out of the art. I'm not saying we shouldn't analyze what we read at all, but I also don't necessarily believe that every thought or character in a story needs to be a symbol for something.

Brash Interlopers: My Thoughts on Dead Men's Path

When I really sat down and thought about it, I started to realie that the short story Dead Men's Path could be applied to our current socio-political climate. I feel like the villagers represent the general populace, happy to go about their own business and do as they please without harming others. they're just passing through the schoolyard to go about paying respects to their dead. The headmaster is the stand-in for legislators who are out of touch with their constituents: forcing change through labor instead of logic. Mr. Obi simply sets his goals and demands that they must be so without first consulting the villagers (or even his colleagues!) as to whether or not it was a good idea to construct his gardens where he did. Obi's influence inadvertently corrupts the lives of the villagers, and he ends up paying the price for it when the villagers decide they've had enough.

A Little Too Ironic: How The Gift of the Magi Relates To My Life

It's interesting how well literature can apply to our lives sometimes. I'd already read O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi prior to this class, but re-reading it reminded me of just how often that well-intentioned gifts for others can backfire due to the cruelty of random chance. I found the story of the Youngs to be similar to another that I'd had: I had purchased a movie for a friend as a graduation gift in high school, one that he'd been talking about wanting to watch for a while, and as it turns out he didn't have a way to watch it--he was moving out of his parents' house the next week and he wouldn't have a TV to bring with him! It really made me think about how strange the idea of buying a gift for someone can really be: you don't have any way of knowing if the recipient will even need what you're getting them because you can't talk to them about the gift or it will spoil the surprise. It's one of life's biggest Catch-22s.

A&P: Life in a Supermarket

As I read the story A&P by John Updike, I was reminded constantly of how similar Updike's supermarket is to our lives. It seems like a rather broad generalization, but the idea is far too prominent to be unintentional. The protagonist, Sammy, represents the younger generation: willing to bend the rules in their own best interests. The "witch" represents the kind of person most of us know: the one who wants the rules enforced when they pertain to themselves. The supermarket's shoppers, the "pigs" and "houseslaves", represent the kind of citizen who is complacent and drawn into their own lives--they wouldn't notice if a "stick of dynamite" went off nearby. The "manager" represents the typical authoritarian figure: he's got plenty of power and he has no problem using it, regardless of the circumstances.

My thoughts on Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture.

I must admit that while I do consider myself to be fairly well-read, I've never paid much attention to the literature of the world. I rationalized it to myself with the thinking that much of the stories' important details would be lost in translation, in addition to the knowledge that I can barely read all the books written by Americans that I want to in a given year. Solzhenitsyn's lecture has caused me to re-evaluate this line of thinking. Upon reading the lecture, I was startled at how clear the ideas behind it were. I didn't feel like there was anything I'd be missing if I hadn't heard it in its original Russian, and perhaps more importantly it made sense. I'm excited to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the coming weeks.