Stefania's blog :)

Jason's representation of his stutter, Hangman, has four commandments through which he control's Jason's speech:  1st Commandment: Thou shalt hide from speech therapists.  2nd Commandment: Thou shalt strangle Taylor when he is nervous about stammering.  3rd Commandment: Thou shalt unleash Taylor when he is not nervous about stammering.  4th Commandment: Once Taylor is "stuttering" in the eyes of the world, he is yours.  All of these have to do with Jason's struggle between his internal self and the perception others have of him - if his classmates didn't have an affect on him, Hangman would have no power to either. I find it interesting how Jason indirectly learned to deal with these commandments throughout the story, and how he was affected by his stammer correlated to his growth in confidence and development as a person.  The first chapters of the book are filled to the brim with Jason's observations of others, as well as obsession over his own prese...

 The last line of the Fun Home  states, "But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.  I found this line interesting - not only as a line to end on, which adds so much significance to it, but as a line to include at all - it takes her relationship with Bruce Bechdel from a very mixed bag of unpleasant childhood experiences and harsh realities of the adult world, to a perhaps not positive but at least consistent one that helped Alison as she changed. This got me thinking about the two of them - specifically, how he influenced the course of her life, and I started to understand the last line of the book to be, somewhat indirectly, true.  Alison's father's role as an antihero shaped her and her personality, often times by challenging her and her worldviews and being a force to push back against. His stifling personality was a tool Alison used to carve her own free and expressive character from. One instance...

     A lot of Esther’s narration and her interactions with other people reminded me of Holden, and I realized that the commonality was their impression that they are truly alone and unique in all of their thoughts and opinions. Each of these characters are very distrustful of others (Holden especially so of adults) and therefore both project a lot of assumptions onto others, even when they have very little evidence of them. I think this attitude contributes a lot to both characters’ deteriorating mental states, and builds as the novel goes on.         The first instance I noticed of this was Esther saying, “I am an observer” to herself (Plath 55). This is a pretty neutral start, nothing too out of the ordinary to just be on the quiet and more observant side. But Esther being an observer extends a lot further than that, as she sees herself as completely separate from other people on some fundamental level – hence, of course, the bell jar. On Page...

Someone brought up in class that they didn't think that Holden did that much coming of age - that he wasn't really an adult when the novel ended, and that it is so ambiguous that readers don't know if the future looks good for him.  I would disagree with that - I think Holden absolutely came of age, even if his ending doesn't fit some people's standard of "of age". He went through a very dramatic change over the course of the book, especially the end, when he came out on the other side of the peak of a mental breakdown and grew from a situation that could have turned out much worse.  I think saying that he didn't really come of age ignores how low his low point in the book was - he wasn't eating, sleeping, thinking straight - he was on the brink of - in fact nearly tipping over into - ruining his life. To stay afloat and make a rational decision to go back to his family, is a very drastic change from the Holden with which the book began, and the Ho...

Beth Harmon from The Queen’s Gambit experiences a coming of age story when she begins playing chess. Through competing in her first tournaments, entering high school, and becoming an adult, Beth changes drastically in her confidence, personal relationships, and dealing with physical maturity.   Beth’s experience playing chess has on her confidence and sense of self that she lacks as a child, and chess changes the way she interacts with others and with stressful situations. In her first weeks after being adopted, she has no connection to her adoptive family, sits alone during lunchtime at school, and is bullied by other students. As she hadn’t played chess competitively in a few years at that point, it appears that her self confidence is at an all time low. However, finding success in a chess tournament helps her regain her footing and her attitude towards school and her peers changes. While she was bullied and excluded in school prior to the beginning of her high school chess...

 I found it interesting that Rambert was one of the few characters that acted (or at least, wanted to act) in his own self-interest over acting for the good of the community. I suppose that he could have been the outlier because he was not really a part of the communiuty at all compared to most of the other characters who lived there and had some sort of emotional tie to the wellbeing of the people there. But I was quite surprised that other characters (especially Rieux, who also has a wife outside of Oran), didn't really empathize with Rambert as much as I would have expected. I'd have thought, that in a life or death situation such as a plague, people would understand if someone would prioritize their own hapiness and life over other people's.  Of course, there is much more at stake here than just the lives of the town's citizens, and Rambert risked getting the plague out and spreading the epidemic, I totally understand that - but I feel as if, being in the situation ...

  When I read the line “A few moments later all the street-lamps went on, dimming the sky…” on page 42 of The Plague , the line was surprisingly jarring to me as it brought me back to the time period the book was set in. To me the book has a strange quality of feeling pretty timeless and perhaps from a time period before the 20 th century – the descriptions of the streets, fashion, and behaviors of the characters for some reason bring the 1880s or so to mind, though I know it was clearly mentioned at the beginning to be set in the 1940s. Why is this so? I think the fact that a mention of electric street lamps that brought me to this analysis of time in the book, directly relates to exactly what about the book gives me the vibe of an earlier time. Of course, streetlamps themselves aren’t even modern technology   – according to a Google search, they’ve been in use since the 1890s. So why is it them that made me think? Skimming the earlier parts of the book, I’m unable to ...

Brett is a particularily interesting character in The Sun Also Rises  because of the way that she challenges our existing assumptions and gut reactions to non-monogamy.  Most of us were raised to limit "good" relationships to monogomous (undoubtedly linked to religious values in America). This is not too surprising in itself - relationships that are not monogomous are often tied to cheating, dishonesty, unhappy marriages, etc. But here we have Brett, a character very comfortable, content, and open with her relationship preferences. As we see in her and Jakes conversations, she has no problem acknowledging that she has close relationships with men other than Jake and her fiance, and her fiance seems to have no problem with it either. He is shown to be just as comfortable with her behavior when he lightheartedly acknowledges a hat another man gave to Brett. He, like Brett, appears to also have unconventional standards and needs in a relationship, but as they are both informed a...

  Any book will, of course, tell us a lot about an author’s worldview, experiences, and personality. Reading Mrs. Dalloway, I found myself often reflecting not on the characters in the story but on Virginia Woolf herself and what drove her to make each of the characters the way they were, and I often thought about how she could have felt deciding and writing the events in her book. What sparked this focus for me was finding out that Virginia Woolf committed suicide – and that, prior to writing Mrs. Dalloway , she had attempted twice already. That is why one of the characters I found most intriguing and quite sobering was Septimus Smith, who I began to look at as not only his own character (still well written and impactful without context on Woolf, of course), but also as a reflection of Woolf’s lowest moments of depression and suicidal thoughts. One of the first parallels I found interesting was moments such as on page 87, when Septimus describes people very negatively and hopele...