Style, Style, Style

“In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” (McCarthy, 150)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: And they walked on, against that intense, surrounding past.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” (Fitzgerald, 180)

Cormac McCarthy: They continued on the road in which all things were of the past.

A Promising Road

Even though I haven’t read Hamlet, I consider I have some understanding of its significance for English and the literary world. This introduction to the film let me understand how monumental it was for the director to film Hamlet, since he states that “there had been lots of films of Hamlet and it seemed entirely impossible that I would be allowed to do it” (Branagh, 1:29-1:34). It is interesting how a piece of art develops with the years to become an icon of that culture, to grow into a monument of life, of that time period, transcending into history. The idea of having a piece of art influence or generate new concepts, new art pieces, new educational guidelines is astonishing. Following this line of thought I wonder: What will be our time period’s legacy? Who will be remembered or better yet change human history forever? What impact will today’s writings and artistic creations pieces have in our culture and future? Will there be a another artistic genius who will have such an impact in the world like Shakespeare?

The possibility of seeing this film version of Hamlet is reveled when Branagh states: “Listen, there has never been on screen, the full length Hamlet” (Branagh, 2:49-2:53). I believe it is very difficult to create a good film from a book or play. I would even state that I haven’t seen a film that surpasses or even equals a book I’ve read in my entire life. Normally what happens is that the film has to eliminate several scenes in order to end up with a reasonable length, also limiting the viewers understanding of the plot, ending up with a disappointing version of the complex ideas expressed in the book or play. Even though I expect some scenes, dialogs or soliloquies to be cut out, I hope this isn’t another lousy version of the written art piece.

From my AP US History class I have learned that most of the people involved with film versions of historic recounts and plays normally agree to participate not because of the economical aspect, but because they are truly fascinated by what they are doing. The director states how “I hope you enjoy us enjoying the film” (Branagh, 7:28-7:31). This makes me reflect on how these individuals are truly giving the best of themselves in order for this film to happen. I believe the created piece at times has to be seen as something in its own right, an illegitimate child of the original piece. The cultural significance of this film as with most of these creations hopefully will break patterns, innovate, surprise and rattle our cage.

The Bodyguard’s Tale

Once an officer of the great Air Force,
I ended up changing my life’s hard course.
Yes, I ended up as a bodyguard,
One more who received Mr. Nacho’s card.
But I hated my job, for I loved cash,
And wanted lots of it in a short flash.

After I had worked twenty years of life,
I could say I had been stabbed with a knife,
Shot five times, and kidnapped twice.
I was fed up of playing cards and dice,
Of receiving a low pay for being in cars,
Having a Glock and more weapons of mars.

The idea of defending a man,
Who had made a fortune in a huge clan,
Still makes my stomach revolt in despair.
For Nacho had killed hundreds, wasn’t fair,
Nor moral with his friends in the government,
And hoped dead or drawn in an accident.

On my disastrous last trip to the FARC,
Of which I was let free by a friend, Mark,
I negotiated a deal with him,
A complot to kill alias Ibrahim,
My one and only boss, for a huge sum.
And so I was compromised for my bum.

The day we killed Nacho I went to church,
Prayed for mercy and good luck in my search
With the money I was about to earn,
Of love and happiness, before I burn,
As all humans do with their sin, lament,
And unhappiness due to their loved cent.

That Friday I checked my bullet-proof vest,
Loaded my guns’ mags and wished for the best.
I took a cab to Nacho’s huge mansion,
Prepared the car in its full expansion,
Joked a bit with my colleagues and the maids,
And spoke to my boss of the route’s parades.

We left at ten and by twelve we met them,
They had parked at the corner’s apothem,
With a couple M60’s on the trucks,
barbed wire on the road, and in a big ruck.
I sat by Nacho’s side, in the car’s back,
And as we slowed down beside the truck’s black,
Rusty machine-gun, I took out my gun,
and shot him twice by his dark, swollen gum.

As I ran out, the convoy burst in flames,
They shot incendiary rounds at the frames,
Killing all, destroying the evidence.
I stayed there in the police’s absence,
Until they came, heard my story and left,
Sending some cranes and repairing the cleft.

Some days later I received my money,
And left the country to find my honey.
I don’t feel bad, for I got rid of pest,
And enjoyed life’s wonderful flashing fest.

Beyond Bonding

Is life truly about where you’re going, or the process itself? As I read The Road, my reading objective was to know what was going to happen to the boy and his father. Were they going to survive? Were they going to find other people? Where would they end up? As I finished the book, with the father’s tragic death, I reflected on my original reading objective, and I concluded that the story itself isn’t what makes McCarthy’s book interesting, it is captivating because of the road it creates as we read, for the path we must travel on. The author is able to give us some insights about traveling, appropriate for this quest: “Maybe you should always be on the lookout. If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it” (McCarthy, 77). I find it interesting how McCarthy captures what both characters are thinking and feeling without leaving behind the human side to the story, the idea of struggling to survive with another human being. The same way the father tried to maintain a good relationship with his son, trying to cheer him up and answering all of the questions he asked, McCarthy does the same with us, giving us the necessary information to continue on this journey, to understand the suffering, to imagine what it would be like to experience these extremes and wonder how we would cope.

The way McCarthy makes the reader view his story, ensures we are emotionally bonded with the characters. The author exploits this bond in order to make everything that the characters think or feel, affect us tremendously. As seen in the father’s reflection when he boards the ship and looks for supplies, hope was something he was running out of: “It occurred to him that he took this windfall in a fashion dangerously close to matter of fact but still he said what he had said before. That good luck might be no such thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead” (McCarthy, 119). The idea of envying the dead, of hoping to loose our lives in order to be satisfied, is extremely tragic. It seems unnatural to envy something most individuals run away from, but it seems reasonable after loosing all faith, of not being able to even believe in luck. This line of thought makes his story verisimilar, while appreciating what the reader must be feeling with every word.

The concept of a road, of a journey or quest, implies in its own definition it must have a beginning and an end, in the sort of way a book has one. The narrator of The Road is able to warn us of this end when he describes how “they camped and when he lay down he knew that he could go no further and that this was the place where he would die” (McCarthy, 144). The road we share with the characters, the road to bonding with our surroundings, be it human or other forms of existence, transforms itself into a rule of living as the journey comes to an end, a rule of existence, of creating a relationship with that which we care about, with that which surrounds us. McCarthy gives us his concept of living, of taking the journey, one that transcends death due to the bond we create with our surroundings.

Reading Once And Again

I don’t really re-read books. I know one should, one changes with time so the second time you read you find new interesting things, you find more meaning to every word, you enjoy remembering how reading it for the first time was, etc. As I read Sonya Chung’s, The Great Gatsby Revisited, I found it extremely interesting how it was for her to read this book as an English teacher, after having read it in high school and college. The Great Gatsby definitely has some incredible sentences, which Chung shows and talks about: “Describing why a sentence is beautiful is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like. For me, Fitzgerald’s sentences are somehow both profoundly weighted and soaring, confident in their matter-of-factness and indulgent in their romanticism” (Sonya Chung). The solemnity and truthfulness of the narrator stands out in this novel, helping Fitzgerald explain complex feelings and perceptions his characters are experimenting and making his novel verisimilar. I agree with Chung’s perception of Fitzgerald sentences, they truly stand out by themselves, showing a complete and believable truth of what is happening, giving the reader enough information of everything that is going on, without being repetitive or too out of order.

Chung appreciates Fitzgerald’s descriptions of the symbolic eyes and Daisy’s voice, something interesting that I hadn’t noticed in my first read of The Great Gatsby. “Both haunt me, they vibrate in my mind and ear well after reading; I hear Daisy and see those gigantic eyes much more vividly than I recall Gatsby himself. With these iterative descriptions, Fitzgerald impresses upon us the complex quality of Gatsby’s allure/repulsion to Daisy…” (Sonya Chung). I believe Fitzgerald’s novel is able to grasp the essence of the time-period with a strong narrator, one that has close relationships with all the characters, and strong descriptions of meaningful events, objects and places that make the story closer to the reader, even as if he was Nick, that individual who experiences the intrigue, violence and corruptness of this society. As with the sentences, Chung understands how significant the descriptions are to make The Great Gatsby stand out, make of itself a classic that both shows the society of this era of artistic and economical transformation.

Re-reading The Great Gatsby made Chung find new connections between Fitzgerald’s narrative and Hitchcock’s thematic and story development as seen when she states that the “yellow car/mistaken identify device, upon which the story’s climax and resolution hinge, feels almost Hitchcockian in its nod to the murder-mystery mixup. Who’s driving which car and why convincingly fuels (literally) Gatsby’s inevitable demise, Tom and Daisy’s flight, and Nick’s final revulsion towards the excesses of Eastern privilege” (Sonya Chung). Developing the climax of a story around an object, such as the yellow car, makes the story both reflect the materialism, economic change and superficiality of the era, helping the reader understand the context and connect the main ideas with one common object. I hadn’t reflected upon this similarity between Fitzgerald’s and Hitchcock’s style, both employing their artistic means of communicating a central idea through the significance of an object. Re-reading now proves being a much more interesting tool than it was before, a tool to help us remember and push us to discover.

Remembering, Yet Creating

In The Road, McCarthy employs different techniques to involve past, present and future with the characters, thus capturing the essence of the plot with more vivid detail. Through his narrator, the author is able to make conclusions of what the characters are feeling, as when he includes a reflection of what memories are for the father, stating that: “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (McCarthy, 67). I find it extremely interesting how remembering, the past, is so important for the characters given the circumstances they are living in. In repeated occasions we find the adult wondering how to describe how the world was to his son, something that makes me think about how everything we do, the choices we make will be shown in history. Definitely there is something violent in remembering, in the altering of what was, to be able to share it, in tying it up with words and limiting it to the wish of the individual. How many times have we heard someone telling an event we were witness to and thinking that wasn’t like that?

The narrator is able to capture what is happening through the feelings of the characters and the conclusions of its essence, as seen when he describes how “somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (McCarthy, 67). The precarious situation of McCarthy’s characters are represented by their relationship with the surroundings, in the feeling of only being able to borrow the time, world and eyes to sorrow about what is happening, in a certain voyeuristic way you are able to do so. The impossibility of the characters of reflecting on what has happened, constantly being on the run, unable to sit down and think, makes us their judges, acting as their minds to make opinions about their decisions and what is happening around them.

McCarthy experiments with the words, the commas and specially the apostrophes to indicate interesting elements of the content of his novel. The narrator describes how “There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all” (McCarthy, 66). In this description, the author is able to make us understand how different it now was for the father to feel about what was happening, how different is the reason for which he is crying than the one that the reader would think. More than that, McCarthy is able to experiment with the missing apostrophe in the word wasn’t, probably reflecting the new world idea, the concept of needed invention in his writing. The reality of lacking everything being the constant. The possibility of understanding and appreciating more than one perception of the story, the past, present and future of the characters enriches the content of the story, helping the author win his readers’ thoughts about his novel.

Parenting A New Culture

There is a moral obligation with parenting, at least that is what good parents can agree upon. The Road exploits this natural feeling, this bond between father and son, giving us an interesting perception of what an individual will do for his breed. The narrator describes how “He wrapped him in his own parka and wrapped him in the blanket and sat holding him, rocking back and forth. A single round left in the revolver. You will not face the truth. You will not” (McCarthy, 35). The difficulties of this journey for survival would easily destroy most individual’s hopes and strength for survival, at least mine. One could ask survive for what? But McCarthy uses the moral obligation involved with parenting to make this verisimilar, having these descriptions of an individual trying to have faith and continue in the journey, to not give up, to try not to face the truth.

The complexity of creating another world, one which would come after that which we call ours, involves creating new customs, as the protagonist states: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (McCarthy, 38). It is common knowledge that one needs a culture, one must have cultural identity in order to exist, making it an urgent necessity in these survivors to create their own, their unique form of living, of coping with this new reality. The details involved in this writing are difficult to imagine, the amounts of work needed to make a reader feel that he or she is living this story, understanding what is happening. The cultural detail is just one of them but without it the whole novel’s feasibility is probably threatened.

McCarthy continues elaborating this world’s culture in unique and interesting ways as seen in the narrator’s description of the flute the father gives his son: “After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin” (McCarthy, 39). The author plays with the perception one must take of each event, as seen by the opposites presented in these sentences, the one that considers this the new music of the new world and the one that considers it the remaining of the previous human existence. The existence of such a debate is given to the text by the human element in the text, the parenting of this new culture.

Emotionally Bonded

While reading The Road it is extremely hard not to imagine what would one feel, what would one do if you were in that extreme situation. One is immersed in the descriptions of day by day life, just how McCarthy wants us to read it, to understand, to feel, to experience the horror. As the two individuals see a corpse in the street, the son asks his dad: “You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” (McCarthy, 6). It must definitely be hard to live in a world, knowing that somebody depends completely on you, being chased by others for food, and still have faith in what you knew, in what was, in what you think it should be. Not knowing if you will have enough food to survive another day, or even not have enough bullets to kill yourself! In the first pages of The Road we can see how memories and the past makes the father fight another day for him and his son to survive, knowing that it is harder to remember what it was than to forget what you don’t want to remember.

McCarthy shows glimpses of what the adult’s childhood and previous life was, emotionally compromising us with the text, obligating us to feel what is happening, bonding us with the characters. As the narrator describes a day of the father’s childhood with his uncle he concludes that “This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon” (McCarthy, 7). Definitely somebody who has lost it all except for his faith in the future must have to be mentally able to affront daily difficulties, one must find something to stick to, to be able to hope, have faith, wake up and fight. McCarthy occasionally uses these flashbacks of the protagonist’s life in order to remind us that these really are human beings, a tiny family struggling to survive.

As father and son reach the adult’s former home, McCarthy describes how his bedroom, his closet was, as the narrator states: “In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be. He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart" (McCarthy, 13). The characterization of the two individuals is given to us through their decisions and their feelings, it is very strange for the narrator to intervene in this way, literally telling us how he is. This description of the protagonist’s soul is very interesting given that the color of the light and his heart, gray, would necessarily imply a mix of black and white, pessimism and hope, death and life, good and evil. Due to the descriptions, the attention to detail and the memories the narrator and the conversations between father and son, we are bonded with the story, with the characters and the tragically deep situation.

Chaucerposition

Raven Vocabulary

Rapping

Surcease

Lattice

Mien

Dirge

Censer

‘Greed Is The Root Of All Evil’

As seen in the Pardoner’s Tale, humankind has an innate desire for wealth at the cost of others’ suffering and work. It is interesting how Chaucer is able to portray this simple message both through his character’s story and the interaction between the storytellers and the Host. The narrator of the story, the Pardoner, makes sure we understand his motives for being a preacher, as seen on the right. I like how Chaucer uses this character to both reflect upon a commonly accepted concept of the impact greed has on an individual’s life and to make fun of the church in this excerpt. It is very sad to think that religion and the various institutions that promote faith have become businesses, businesses of the soul.

The pardoner is portrayed as a complex individual by Chaucer, for by accepting being greedy and money-oriented he preaches that which he fails to do as seen when he states:Although the pardoner is greedy and makes a living of the other’s fear and regret, he has some interesting approaches to what life is and what makes us corrupt individuals. With this Chaucer is probably indicating that greedy people are not necessarily illogical, or unaware of what is happening. I think it is very interesting how our society has built a system for which greed makes us have more without having to work or use our resources as we would have had to in order to acquire the same wealth. Does our economical system and culture incite greed?

Sometimes people have to sin and suffer the consequences or have obstacles in life in order to understand why things happen. In the pardoner’s case we find an individual who understands why greed is a cause of evil, and even though he doesn’t apply it to his own life, tries his best to make others’ understand this as seen when he states:It is ironic how the appropriate individual to teach a moral story is he who is not moral. This is probably why the church has lost followers and influence in people’s lives. I find it interesting how we are not capable to apply what we have learned, what we understand and appreciate to our own lives but see evil in it when others’ follow our example. We must first become what we want to see in others’, for why do we desire to see change in that which we can’t control, and refuse to do so in that in which we can?

Nobility, Wealth, Happiness

The quest for happiness, probably the hardest goal in life is truly a discussion topic. In the Wife of Bath’s Tale we encounter interesting approaches to this aspiration from different perspectives. The knight’s quest to find what women mostly cherish in order to save his life, brings up different answers which consider superficial aspects of a woman’s life as those seen on the right. It is interesting how the author captures the essence of the approaches given to such an interesting and important question. The answer of an old woman, which the knight finally adopts, obliges the knight to marry this old woman, a character which probably reflects some of Chaucer’s own conclusions in this topic without loosing the humoristic approach of the Miller’s Tale.

After the knight complains of his wife’s humble lineage, age and ugliness, the old woman asks him to: The old woman’s response to the knight’s accusation made me think of how a society where a person is judged not by his money or family but by his merits and nobleness would work. There would surely be more competition. Most people would probably work harder and better. Do we really need to be punished, to have difficulties to work at our maximum potential, can’t we abandon sin without having to be threatened and forced to do so? At least we have the option to do so.

As the old woman discusses poverty and wealth she states that This approach to happiness and wealth, not as the quantification of possessions and social status but as a quantification of gratefulness, of fulfillment is very idealistic and interesting in my opinion. Somebody that lives up to this truthfully, that doesn’t need more to live better, could probably reach an emotional state in which any material change would not affect his level of happiness. It is interesting how some of the richest individuals become philanthropists and live pretty “normal” lives such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet when they reach humongous sums of money. I also find it incredible how “American families who make over $300,000 a year donate to charity a mere 4 percent of their incomes.” (Lyubomirsky - Scientific American) Do we need to own Bill Gate’s assets to understand that money isn’t everything, that it can’t buy us happiness? Satisfaction is in many cases related to happiness, should we lower our expectations, or increase our gratefulness?