Annemily's Blog

Having spent half the novel with Ma and Jack in Room, I was at first really shocked by how people criticized Ma and how defensive she had to be. It seemed to me that Ma routinely did superhuman things in Room from creating tons of great activities for Jack while always being patient with him to constantly trying to escape or get rescued to acting in her interactions with Old Nick to get as much of what she needed from him as possible. The scene that angered me the most was the one where Ma did the interview. The interviewer asked a lot of terrible questions, whether they completely ignored what Ma had said previously or showed a total lack of empathy and understand of what Ma had been through, but I’ll transcribe just part of the interview here: “[…] did you ever consider asking your captor to take Jack away?” “Away?” “To leave him outside a hospital, say, so he could be adopted. As you yourself were, very happily, I believe.” I can see Ma swallow. “Why would I have done t...

*This post talks about the ending of A Lesson Before Dying so stop reading if you haven’t finished the book and you don’t want to find out how it ends* When we started A Lesson Before Dying , we talked a lot about how the story could possibly reach a resolution and we didn’t come up with an answer. Going into the last chapter, I still wasn’t sure how I expected or even wanted it to end. Given all the anticipation of the end, I found the actual end and especially the last lines really intriguing: “I turned from [Paul] and went back into the church. Irene Cole told the class to rise, with their shoulders back. I went up to the desk and turned to face them. I was crying” (256). The thing that struck me most was the emotional vulnerability of “I was crying.” Of course Grant’s emotions are likely more intense at this point in the book than any other. But I do think it’s a change from the way Grant tries to deflect or avoid the pain he feels earlier in the book. Grant repeatedly tr...

Addie has all the characteristics of an excessively terrible person. She likes beating children: “I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them” (170).   She cheated on her husband. She even hates spring (every sane person’s favorite season and you can fight me on that); she goes down to a stream after school “especially in the early spring, for it was the worst then” (169). And yet I found her one of the most sympathetic characters in the book? So how could such a terrible person be sympathetic? Well for one thing, a lot of the terrible things she does have some sort of justification. Addie hates her job and the children she has to work with but as a single woman without any family to support her, she has to work and she wouldn’t really have any options besides teaching. There’s no excuse for beating kids but at least it doesn’t just bring her joy because she’s a sadist, it brings her joy because she is able to hurt the peop...

A lot of the things I’m still struggling to understand in the Odyssey are rooted in things I don’t understand about society in Odysseus’s Greece and especially about class in the Odyssey. So I did a bit of historical research to see if it could help me understand what Odysseus is dealing with. First off – I understand that Greece was comprised of many small kingdoms ruled independently (kingdoms might not be the correct word, but you get the idea) and there was a lot of cultural variety and not everyone necessarily fit into a few neat class categories. I also understand that the Odyssey is set in a variety of locations and that it might have been written over an extended period of time. Nevertheless, I think some vague generalizations about ancient Greek culture might be useful. Basically, the hierarchy in Ancient Greek society had male citizens at the top (including aristocrats with land, poorer farmers, and a middle class including artisans and traders), t...

We’ve discussed a lot to what extent we think Odysseus is a reliable narrator. The main piece of evidence for his reliability is that he includes details about the way he treated his crew that reflect badly on him. Today in class I suggested that he could include these details to make lies seem more realistic and someone suggested that Odysseus probably just truly feels bad about his men’s deaths. But that started me thinking about the weird dynamic of Odysseus’s relationship with his crew so I looked back in the book to see how he talks about his men and their deaths. I presented on book eleven, so I immediately thought of Elpenor. Elpenor certainly seems important to Odysseus since Odysseus mentions him three times: when he first died, when he’s in the underworld, and when he’s actually buried. Odysseus’s attention to Elpenor both in burying him with all the proper rituals and in describing his death in detail in his story shows that Odysseus has some level of affection for him...