Response on The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Honestly, I am not sure yet whether I like this excerpt or whether not. This is may be because there is so less action in this piece of literature that helps me forming an opinion. This excerpt tells about a character who mentions his favourite place which is under the eucalyptus trees and his relationship to nature and how he perceives especially the eucalyptus trees and some animals.

The first odd thing about the character is how he discovers human traits in the eucalyptus trees:

“I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance … I noticed how the leaves almost looked human the way they bowed and then leaped up and then swayed lyrically side to side. It was a crazy vision in my mind but beautiful.”

Then he continues describing a “hummingbird, a beautiful little blue hummingbird no bigger than a dragonfly, kept making a whistling jet dive at me, definitely saying hello to me, every day, usually in the morning”.

This seems to create a very harmonic- even too harmonic- picture of the scene. But then he continues to say that he was “afraid he would drive right into my head with his long beaker like a hatpin”.

All in all it is interesting how the speaker creates a certain distance by on the one hand describing the romantic landscape picture and on the other hand perceiving a little hummingbird as a threat.

Creative Entry

In the following entry I tried to create some examples of irony based on last Friday’s session:

The current safety certificate behind the pane of plexiglass hanging incliningly above the seats impends to fell off today rather than yesterday due to a single rusty screw.

She walked on the path watching nature’s beauty, for instance, the little reddish squirrel running across the lawn before she went back to her room and killed a little spider rappeling from the ceiling with insect spray.

Response on Chapter 8

Chapter eight deals with the point of view in literature as well as with the authorial distance and its limitations in terms of liability of the narrator. It also includes aspects of irony which I found very interesting and challenging.

In respect to the liability I would like to respond on the short story entitled Story by Lydia Davis since this story shows in how far psychic distance can influence the reader’s thinking of the story.

Story is about a woman who has an affair with a man who obviously dates his ex- girlfriend. The way the author describes the character’s inner state and thoughts makes the readyer feel sympathy for the narrator. At the end of the story the first person narrator scrutinizes her boyfriends explanations of what had happened that particular night why his ex-girlfriend would be at his place. I think it is really realistic how the narrator measures all possibilties that would explain why the ex-girlfriend would be at his place:

“But what is the truth? Could he and she both really have come back in that short interval between my last phone call and my arrival at his place? Or is the truth really that during his call to me she waited outside or in garage or in her car and that he then brought her in again …”

Finally, the narrator becomes aware that her boyfriend that she cannot believe him but pretends to do so since she is so attached to him and does not want to lose him.

Response on James Joyce’s Araby

Honestly I had did some research on the internet what the term epiphany means since I have not heard of it before. I have found that epiphany is “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epiphany).

All in all, this short story is about a boy who lives in a very poor neighbothood in Dublin. He falls in love with his friend’s sister and wants to buy her a present at the Araby market. But he arrives very late so that he recognized that most of the stalls are already closed. He is very disappointed of the baazar and went home.

Reading the story it appears to me that all conflict the narrator struggles with occurs inside his mind. At the the end of the story the nnarrotor transforms from an idealistic boy to an adolescents who does not see things like he did before but in a more realistic and rather disappointed manner: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
Finally, I think that using the technique of epiphany in literature makes stories appear to be very close to real life. I have experienced some kind of epiphany myself. I thought I would be friends with somebody and than after an insignificant incident I suddenly realized that he was not a friend at all.

Short Story Draft: DON'T ASK!

Anne looked at the ceiling watching the dull light bulbs. One of them was flickering like in a horror movie. Her situation was horrible, too. She has just eaten a dish which contained peanuts. She was allergic of peanuts. Luckily, the waiter called the ambulance quickly and she was brought to the nearest hospital. The doctors told her she had to stay there for some days. She was put in a three bed room and she became the bed in the middle. How she wished to have one of the other beds. But they were already occupied by two young women. The one on the left side was sleeping and the woman on the right was starring at the window. Anne wanted to start a conversation. She asked the woman on the right how she was doing? That is always a good question… The other woman turned to Anne and looked very thoughtfully. Her name was Katie but she wouldn’t tell Anne. She hated meaningless conversations. Maybe she could have told Anne that she became pregnant from an alcoholic when she was sixteen. Or that when she had her baby she struggled from financial problems since her fiancé had left her. Or that she saw no other chance to become a prostitute. Maybe she could have told Anne that her pander maltreated her when she resisted having sex with a client who had strangled her some time ago. Or she could have mentioned that she started drinking and doing drugs in order to bear her miserable life. And that her six years old daughter was hit by a car three days ago and died on the way to the hospital while she had another client. Maybe she could have told that she tried to commit suicide since she could not live without her daughter. Or that, unfortunately, somebody had found her in time… But the only thing she said was “I’m good” while turning back to the window…

Response On Chapter 7

Basically, chapter seven deals with the point of view in fiction. It distinguishes between three distinct speakers a story can be told of: the third person speaker, the second person speaker, and the first person speaker. Moreover, it gives an overview on omniscience and whom a particular speaker addresses.

I like the short story entitled Orientation by Daniel Orozco and will respond of this piece of literature. In this story an office worker introduces someone new to his new job. During the whole story, the new employee listens to his colleague. He just asks one question but his dialogue is not included- only indicated by the story teller: “What do I mean? I’m glad you asked that.”

The first part is about general background information about work and the office. But later the speaker includes more and more gossip about the other office workers, for instance, about a man who is thrilled by using the women’s bathroom. Another favourite topic of his is about other people’s relationships: “He has a secret crush on Gwendolyn Stich […]. But he hates Anika Bloom.”

The story becomes supernatural and some kind of surreal at the end. The speaker tells about a woman who can say when people die. Moreover, he mentions that one of his colleagues is a serial killer.

All in all, the speaker provides so much background information about the people working in this office which make it rather unlikely to recall all the details. Moreover, since only one character speaks (the speaker) the story is told from his point of view only. So maybe not everything he told is true.

Response On: The Valley of Spiders by H.G. Wells

This excerpt is about a group of men who are riding through weir territory. The master of this group is determined to find a young woman who ha just escaped him. The men are attacked by big white globes which appear to be spider webs and being filled with spiders. When one man saves his master’s life he falls off his horse and is committed to the spiders. Instead of helping him out of this situation, the master takes his horse and rides away. Another man cannot understand his master’s behavior and it comes to an argument in which the master kills his subject.

Actually I do not like this excerpt because of the story itself which seems to be very unrealistic to me. Moreover, it is very peripatetically written I think.

However, the excerpt strikes through its unusual and colourful description of the landscape as in the following passage:

“It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of serethorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some nowwaterless ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purpledistances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills--hills it might be of a greener kind--and above them invisiblysupported, and seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snowcladsummits of mountains that grew larger and bolder to the north-westwardas the sides of the valley drew together. And westward the valleyopened until a distant darkness under the sky told where the forestsbegan.”

All in all, this excerpt has not convinced me and I will probably not read the whole book.