Hero Essay

I've been thinking about this essay ever since we got the prompt and I am still not entirely sure what exactly I am going to write about, but like many others, I am going to write about the Harry Potter series.  I’m not choosing it because it’s popular or because I particularly relate to the characters, but mostly because of the effect it had on me.  I don’t remember exactly when I started reading it, but based on who I was friends with at the time, I’m guessing it was around age 6. I remember playing with my friends and having them say something around the lines of “Let’s play Harry Potter!” and me being like “What is that?” as I had never heard of it before.  But I pretended like I knew what I was doing and went along with it. In the beginning, I wasn’t really at that reading level yet, but after a while of my dad reading to me at a pace of a couple pages every few nights, I believed he was going too slow, and took the book to read myself. And that is when my obsession started.  As basically the first book I ever read, it became the book to compare all others to, and to this day, the inner child in me argues that nothing will live up to it.

To recap the storyline, young orphan Harry Potter finds out he is a wizard and that he is destined to vanquish Voldemort AKA You-Know-Who, He Who Must Not Be Named, and the Dark Lord.  He collects his wand, robes, and trusty owl Hedwig before heading off to Hogwarts.  There he meets his new best friends Ron and Hermione and gets into various forms of trouble before saving the day year after year.  One thing that drew me into this story was the main characters. I tolerated Ron who was mostly just comic relief and someone to serve as Harry’s best guy friend, I was impressed with Hermione who was seriously smart and the number of times she saved Harry’s and Ron’s lives, and then there’s Harry.  The guy that had no clue what he was doing but always managed to come up with something. But what drew me in the most to this story was the call to adventure. What Harry Potter provided for me was a chance to dive into another world and escape from more the boring monotonous life of kindergarten.  When I was that age, it also served as a hope for the future: that something exciting could always happen; that one day I would get my acceptance letter and go off to Hogwarts.

Hero's Journey

From here on out, everything is for hero's journey.

The White Boy Shuffle

While I was researching poems for my poetry presentation, one that I came across and liked very much is “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay.  Unfortunately, someone already did it and apparently I was gone that day, which is sad because it would have been an interesting discussion.  To refresh people’s memory, here it is:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Now that we’ve finished White Boy Shuffle, I’m curious how the speaker in this poem would get along with the Gunnar at the end of the book.  Both are similar in the way that they both think about death. Also sidenote, I feel like in the end, there are two versions of Gunnar: one version is his thoughts and the other is the way the public sees him as a messiah of some sort.  So Messiah Gunnar is pretty similar to the speaker. He is speaking to a crowd and talking about his own suicide, but the crowd takes it to mean that he believes that people should commit suicide to protest society. The speaker is also accepting death by fighting back and saying that if we have to die, it should be for a good reason and fighting an enemy.  Messiah Gunnar’s believers are in a way doing the same thing, but their enemy is not physically in front of them, which changes the whole situation, because they have a choice, whereas the speaker is saying if we have no other choice. But these people do have a choice. There’s also Gunnar’s thoughts that he keeps to himself. With these he just wants out of this life and he is thinking why bother to fight if it won’t change anything.  The speaker in the poem does not agree, and because of that, even though he is talking about death, it gives the poem a more hopeful outlook, which is a much better way to look at things.

Nexus

For Friday, we read “Nexus” by Rita Dove, which Olivia did a great job of reading.  At first glance, I had no clue what this poem was about, but found it vaguely sinister with the “giant praying mantis” that was “begging vacantly” with “his ragged jaws opening onto formlessness.”  As someone who is not a huge fan of bugs, this seemed very nightmarish. But in class we discussed the title and how it fit into the poem and for me, that made the poem lose its ominous feeling.

According to the OED, one definition is “A central point or point of convergence; a focus; a meeting-place.”  We discussed how in the poem the window mentioned in the second line could be a nexus for the speaker, who is a poet or a writer of some sort.  Itcan be seen as a point of convergence between the real world and the world that is being written about. From the second line on in the poem, the things being described are surreal and fantastical.  To me, it seems like in the first and second stanzas, the speaker is separated from the world she is writing about; she is inside writing “stubbornly” while the world of writing is trying to draw her in.  Unfortunately, she is separated by the glass, but in the third stanza, she is fully drawn into the work and is immersed when she finally walks outside into the “lapping darkness,” where she is met with an “absurdly green brontosaurus.”  

I wish writing was like this for me, where I can be drawn in and lose track of all time and reality, but unfortunately I still see it as something I am forced to do.  Luckily, reading is not the same, and that is when I can experience what the speaker is describing and be immersed into this incredible world.

The Four Horsemen

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she starts off a chapter with “the four horsemen came-schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff” (174).  Immediately the imagery that comes to mind is the Four Horsemen from the Bible, who come to Earth as part of the Apocalypse.  And in the book, the events following the four horsemen’s arrival can definitely be seen as apocalyptic and world changing. As the mother of four children, Sethe has to make a horrible, split-second decision: does she want her children to experience the horrors that she went through in slaver, or is there another option?  Readers judge her decision one way or another, but I’m not sure we have the right. We can read about Sethe’s experience and try to imagine it, but most readers have never experienced anything like what she went through and most likely we never will.

Back to the four horsemen, why did Morrison choose to have the reader’s initial impression of this scene from the outsider’s perspective?  One factor was probably timing. You can include these perspectives now and then go back to Sethe’s and other’s later in order to get as much out of the scene as possible.  Another point that was brought up in class is because of emotions. The four outsiders are cruel people who are doing their job and only care about retrieving what they see as property and bringing them back so that they can be paid.  They don’t have emotions and they can look at this scene in a way and describe it and only give us the facts. Other characters that are involved would look at it and be biased by their emotions. The four horsemen can look at the scene, ignore the tragedy, and give us the cold, hard facts.  Seeing this lack of compassion just gives us more reasons to sympathize with Sethe and try to understand her decision.

Janie, Hurston and Angelou

Last week we read “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou and while discussing it, I started thinking about how it applied to Their Eyes Were Watching God.  In her poem, Angelou’s narrator is a woman who is speaking out strongly against everyone who “wants to see [her] broken.”  We asked the question in class about does this apply to Janie. Overall, it seems she doesn't really. She spends most of the book finding love, or what she thinks it is, and then losing it.  But then after going through all of this we see her how we are introduced to her in the prologue, a woman who walks into town with her hair down and wearing overalls, not caring what all the others sitting on the porch are saying about her.  Although she is not quite at the level of the speaker in “Still I Rise,” she is on her way. Zora Neale Hurston on the other hand is very similar to the speaker. From what we learned about her in the documentary we watched, she is confident and also not afraid to pursue her career.  One of my favorite quotes from her is “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.”

Thinking about Janie and Hurston as strong characters reminds me of Richard Wright’s criticism.  He writes that “Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatever to move in the direction of serious fiction” and that her books willingly continue the minstrel tradition.  He doesn’t like that the book is not openly a protest novel, and that it doesn’t have an idea that “lends itself to significant interpretation.” I agree with Wright that this book isn’t a protest novel.  Maybe if Janie gained her confidence a little bit earlier and if she displayed that confidence in front of a white community, like the speaker in “Still I Rise,” but she doesn’t. And while Wright might not agree with that, there is literally no problem with it.  Maybe Hurston didn’t want her book to be explicitly about social problems, maybe she just wanted to focus on the more romantic aspects. And that is perfectly acceptable and led to an amazing novel.

Ellison and the Narrator

One of the first things I noticed while watching Ralph Ellison: An American Journey was how similar Ellison’s life was to the narrator’s in Invisible Man.  Both of them worked hard in school in order to better themselves.  The narrator had to go through the Battle Royale in order to get a scholarship to college, and while it was not very realistic, it was a good metaphor for how hard it could be for African-Americans to get it into college.  Ellison also experienced problems when applying to college. He wanted to go to Tuskegee and applied twice and was denied before finally getting a scholarship for music. But after a while, he started endangering his scholarship.  Unlike the narrator, he didn’t take an important white man to a controversial man’s house, but he did start spending less time on music and more time in the library reading and getting more and more interested in literature.

Like the narrator, Ellison chose to leave behind the university and head to New York for more opportunities and to get a job, although Ellison had more of a choice than the narrator did.  While in New York, both Ellison and the narrator meet people who influenced them and presented them with opportunities, but in very different ways. The narrator met Mr. Emerson who gave him a job at a paint factory and then he met Brother Jack.  Ellison met Langston Hughes and then Richard Wright. The movie referred to Invisible Man as a “fictionalized autobiography” and I agree.  Ellison took the basic facts from his life and gave them a slight twist and made them less fortunate.  While Ellison met other writers and artists who inspired and encouraged his work, the narrator met a man who took advantage of him and led him in the wrong direction.  And while Ellison and the narrator hid similar beginnings, they had very different endings with Ellison being an accomplished writer, and the narrator living in a hole for a long time.  It’s easy to see that Ellison was very fortunate with who he met in New York and how his life could be very different without that happening.