African American Literature

Dialogue

The dialogue in Libra is pretty distinctive. It is often short snippets between two characters going back and forth for a while without a lot of dialogue tags. The real meaning of what the characters are saying is hardly ever on the surface. Take Wayne and Raymo in the car on the way to Dallas as an example: “I’m still absorbing this thing,” Wayne said, looking across at Raymo. “You read science fiction?” “Fucking crazy, Wayne?” “There’s a quality I used to feel before a night jump. Like is this actually happening?” “We’re talking this is real.” “I know it’s real.” “First they cancel Chicago right out. Then they do Miami without the motorcade. They know it’s real.” Wayne kept studying Raymo, occasionally darting a look at the road. The car was tight and quiet, beautifully behaved. “Like we’re racing across the night,” he said, mock-hysterical. “They’re paying some nice money. Think of you’re doing a day’s work.” “Like we’re hand-picked men on the biggest miss...

How does Odysseus feel about his men? Bonus: a lot of questions about class

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...

Mary

One thing that confused me in Invisible Man was why the narrator wants to return to Mary at the end of Chapter 25. As he flees from the riot he “ran expecting death between the shoulder blades or through the back of [his] head, and as [he] ran [he] was trying to get to Mary’s” (560). He continues to think of Mary’s as his destination until at the end of the chapter he realizes that “I couldn’t return to Mary’s or to any part of my old life” (571). The narrator is never specific about the logistics of returning to Mary. On the one hand, he’s running in a panic so that makes some sense. On the other hand, he just dropped out of Mary’s life months ago without saying goodbye or contacting her at all since then. If she saw the narrator again, Mary could very well be angry with him and at the very least she would want some sort of an explanation, which the narrator would struggle to give, given that he tells his story for the first time in the book. So the narrator probably doesn’t...

Annemily's Blog

Search This Blog