Heroic Contemplation

The major question that keeps coming back to my mind as we read Room is whether Jack will be able to recover from everything and live a normal life afterwards. I didn't expect them to escape Room so quickly. I thought that the whole book would be focused on them escaping Room, but now that they are out a new conflict has arisen. That is the problem of whether Jack and Ma will be able to adjust. I personally do not think that Jack will be able to develop normally. On page 209 Dr. Clay mentions how Jack is still plastic, and so there is still the possibility of him putting the whole Room experience behind him and developing normally. The reason why I don't think Jack will be able to recover is because he is still so attached to Ma, and Ma has kind of raised him in ignorance, so he doesn't understand the actual world. To address my first point, Jack is still unusually dependent on Ma. He still breastfeeds from her, and he can't stand being separated from her for any am

When I reflect back on this book the one thing that keeps coming back to my mind is Jefferson's journal entry, and I don't think it's recency bias. It was a super emotionally fraught and raw chapter. It was also drastically different from what we were used to reading. Everything we had read so far was from Grant's perspective, and very little included Grant's actual encounters with Jefferson. So, it was a stark contrast to have a whole chapter from Jefferson's perspective, at the climax of the book. I was thinking: what does this chapter tell us about Grant and Jefferson's relationship? I think it confirmed that Grant was successful in achieving Miss Emma's goal. Jefferson seemed much more mature and heroic than he did at first (developing from acting like a hog to make a point, to wanting a whole gallon of ice cream, to asking for a thoughtful final meal with a reasonable amount of ice cream). The chapter also showed that Grant was successful in becom

♫  She said lay me away, I tell her alright okay, I only love my wife and some new teeth I'm sorry  ♫ I don't really know what Anse was thinking when he promised Addie to bury her in Jefferson, but it was probably quite close to that. In all serious though, I want to talk about Addie's plan for making her family journey to Jefferson, and what Anse's stubbornness and attitude towards others reflects upon him in the role of paterfamilias.  Addie wanted to make the whole family suffer by forcing them go to Jefferson to bury her, and I think that is has worked out quite well so far (I have not finished the book yet so I don't know how it ends but I imagine with Faulkner everything is going to go extremely poorly). I'm really wondering why, though? Did she hate Anse and her kids so much that she wanted them to be miserable, or did she just not know how much they would have to endure to get her buried? I know that she did not seem quite fond of her children. She r

Book 22 startled me even though I was prepared for bloodshed. The graphic detail with which every killing took place reminded me of a fast-paced hack-and-slash video game, and the lack of mercy that Odysseus fought with was definitively uncharacteristic of a hero. I was already hesitant toward the idea of killing all of the suitors -- the entire population of noble young men in the area -- especially when they were acting within the rules of their society (to court Penelope). Granted, they were not graceful and at some points were downright rude, but that didn't completely justify in my mind the decision to kill them. That's why I was taken aback by the absolute slaughter that took place. Odysseus did not take mercy on anyone except the people that could tell stories of his greatness: the minstrel Phemius and the herald Medon. Others who begged for his mercy were cut down. Again, we saw Odysseus' overwhelming self obsession. As evidenced when he asks the Phaeacian bard to

Is Odysseus really a hero? This question has come up in my mind several times in class discussions recently. To me, he seems more like a guy who's just along for the ride in a journey that the gods are providing him. Some gods hate him, some gods love him, and he is like a pawn in their game of power. The examples are plentiful. He is always being told what to do or being forced to do something against his will, and once he finally overcomes one set of obstacles another comes up. For example, Circe tells him to sail past the sirens and then Scylla and Charybdis. Zeus then forces him to stay for a month on the island of the Sun, Thrinacia, and that causes his men to starve and eat the Sun god's cattle which in turn makes Zeus punish the crew even more. Like I said, Odysseus seems more like a guy who goes with the flow of the gods, not really a character with much say in the matter. The reason I started thinking about whether we could classify Odysseus as a hero or not stemmed

One of the hero's journey narratives that has had a large impact on my life has been from the movie Kung Fu Panda. Apart from the comedic appeal of Jack Black, the movie resonated with me because of the lessons that the main character, Po, learned along the way. Based in a village in ancient China, the animated Kung Fu Panda movie (I will just be talking about the first one) centers around the adventure of a panda named Po. Po grew up revering the art of kung fu and the kung fu masters that live next to his noodle shop. When he is named the next dragon warrior, or kung fu prodigy, he is thrown into a whole new world where he must learn how to fight in order to save his village. Thus, he is an example of "an ordinary person elevated by circumstance into a heroic position." Many of the basic elements of the hero's journey outlined by Joseph Campbell are present in this movie. Some examples of which are the ordinary world (life in the noodle shop), the call to adventur