Addie Bundren

Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying is a complicated character.  For the entire first half of the book we only see her in a sympathetic way.  She is sick and dying and her family is gathered around her caring for her and morning her when she’s gone.  They even go on this insane and dangerous trip in order to bury her where she asked for it. The whole beginning of the book is focused on love and family but it turns out to be a lie.  When we finally get to Addie’s chapter in the book, we find out that she is a teacher who hates her job and would even go as far as to beat the children. But even with knowing that fact, Addie can be seen as sympathetic.  She is forced into a teaching job because she is a single woman and that's basically her only option. Then she is forced into a marriage with Anse, who is not the best husband, and forced to have his kids, even though she doesn’t want to.  She has feelings that were not socially acceptable for that time period and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Addie gets her revenge by having Anse journey to bury her with a family that she doesn’t even care about.  She sees her death as the ultimate divorce. They are eternally separated by being buried in different towns.  This is where we can start to see the reference in the title come into play. In book 11 of The Odyssey, Agamemnon tells Odysseus that “As I lay dying, that woman with the dog's eye would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”  He’s talking about his wife Clytemnestra who betrayed him and cheated on him. Anse can be seen as the same as Agamemnon: his wife cheated on him and didn’t care about him, and they ended up being separated by death.  Also, throughout her chapter, Addie refers to Anse as dead. But you can also see Addie as a sort of Agamemnon. While she is married to Anse, she is not dead physically, but in her soul, because of being forced into this relationship she didn’t want and that ended up violating her.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

This week we watched Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? in class and I enjoyed it.  I’m pretty sure that if it hadn’t said that it was based on The Odyssey by Homer, I never would have made the connection, but that was what I liked about it.  It wasn’t just copied scene for scene and that made it a great movie to watch in class and discuss in relation to The Odyssey.  

I found that the setting of the Depression Era South was a great choice for the movie.  Like we discussed in class, this setting and time period is almost like a different reality or a far away mythic land, which is similar to how we feel about Ancient Greek myths.  And then the folk music that went along with the movie (which was amazing and fit perfectly) is almost like the American version of epic poems: they were passed around by word of mouth and no one is really sure where it started or who the true author is.  The South is also sprawling fields with towns that are few and far between, which is not only reminiscent of Ancient Greece, but it serves to make the different scenes in the movie very episodic, which takes us straight back to the Wanderings of Odysseus.

Another part of having the movie take place in the South was having religion take the place of the Gods.  It’s pretty explicitly shown when Everett prays to God and a flood comes and saves him and the others while wiping out all the bad guys, but other instances of divine help are not as explicit as when Athena helps Odysseus.  One thing that came up a few times in class was the hair pomade. Everett would not be the same person without his Dapper Dan hair pomade and it can be seen as a comparison to Athena lavishing splendor onto him, while also adding humour to the situation.  Another time Everett receives divine help is when Pappy O’Daniel steps in and pardons them of their crimes without even knowing what they are. He saw how much the crowd loved them and decided to take advantage of it and use them as pawns in his campaign for governor, which brings us back to the idea of the Gods using humans as pawns in their game and for their own entertainment.

Odysseus

When I first heard we were reading The Odyssey for this class, I was excited.  I’ve always been a fan of Greek myths and The Odyssey has references to a number of them.  I also feel like it’s one of those books that’s a classic that you should read at some point during your life.  At the same time, I was worried because other books that I have read that are older, like Paradise Lost and Doctor Faustus and various Shakespeare novels, I found very hard to read and almost impossible to get through.  With that line of thinking, I expected that I would dread the nightly readings, but I was wrong. I’m glad that we are reading Emily Wilson’s translation because she did an amazing job of getting rid of all the flowery language and the excruciatingly detailed descriptions that I was not interested in.  She keeps it to the basic facts and it makes it easier to concentrate more on the story and characters and get more out of them.
In the Telemachiad, we were introduced to Telemachus and we followed his story for a while.  Like we discussed in class, he was a reactionary character for a lot of it. He spent twenty years moping around the castle until Athena pushed him into doing something.  She led him on a mini-hero’s journey to find out information about his father. We discussed why she felt the need to do this and I believe it was a way for him to gain confidence so he could be more similar to his father and impress him when Odysseus returns.  In the first four books of The Odyssey, we keep hearing about the amazing hero Odysseus and how awesome he was in battle and how he tricked the enemy with his mind and all these other details.  When we meet him in book five, all these things are true, but at the same time I’m not quite sure what to think of them. He is constantly described as talking with careful calculation and tact, which is smart because he wants to be careful with what information he tells strangers, but it still makes him seem sorta sneaky and not exactly someone to trust.  In books 11 and 12, he starts telling his story of what happened after he left Ogygia and how he slowly loses all his crew members. Many of them weren’t his fault and he couldn’t really do anything, but with Scylla, he knowingly sacrificed six men without telling them. I know it was his only option to get past and to finally get home, but it still rubs me the wrong way.  I’m curious what will happen next so I can get more of a feel for Odysseus.

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.