Madrigal

Well, this is my last blog for AP Lit. I’ve got to say, it has been a lot of fun writing all these different posts over the year, from books to poems to music to movies to whatever seemed to have noteworthy literary merit, there’s a blog for it. For this last blog, I felt it only fitting to find some work that had pertinence toward my current situation with approaching graduation and the anxiety of AP tests and finals coming up in the following few weeks. I also wanted to explore some more of the lyrics of Rush, so for this I found one of their lesser known works, “Madrigal”, to analyze for some meaning for myself. The title of the song refers to a form of 16^th century cantata-like poetic work in which there was not necessarily a specific form but each line sought to express as much emotion as possible. Neil Peart’s lyrics masterfully take on the challenge, essentially describing a man who finds himself beaten down by the foes and fears of his life and in the process struggles to maintain some sort of meaning and purpose in his life. The short song opens with the lines, “When the dragons grow too mighty To slay with pen or sword/I grow weary of the battle And the storm I walk toward”. Clearly, Peart is describing a person who is constantly attacked by oppressive forces greater than they are, and in natural response are forced to defend themselves from utter destruction, in the process finding themselves progressively worn down and tired in the process. I think it is fair to say that everyone at some point in their lives feel the ominous presence of the “dragons” that constantly wear down on people, whether it is school, final exams, work, business, anything that serves to wear down a person both physically and mentally to the near point of defeat. In such attacks is the struggle to maintain meaning and purpose of one’s own life, as the attacks of the dragon make it very easy to forget who you are. The song attests to such circumstances with the lines, “When all around is madness
And there's no safe port in view”. Like the existentialist dragon of Grendel predicted, chaos is a weapon that can manipulated powerfully against others, and the various dragons of our own lives know how to inflict it dangerously well. While the pessimistic thoughts of anxiety, disillusionment, and chaos may not be the most uplifting qualities of my situation, the song provides an answer to all such questions and foreboding thoughts, which is finding peace in acknowledgement of fellowship and friendship with another person. The song reflects this with the lines, “I long to turn my path homeward to stop awhile with you…There's a beacon in the darkness in a distant pair of eyes”. The great comfort that this song brings to the world-weary narrator is the comfort of knowing that he has someone worth living for, someone who is a living testament to the fact that he should not let the trials and tribulations of the world bring him down to such a state of despair. While the song may imply this person to be a woman that he loves, I think when looking at the song in a broader sense it can apply to bonds that people have with friends and family as well. The hope is the recognition that no matter how difficult life will get, there will always be those who can be counted on to be there for you and remind you that the dragons of this world are only as strong as you let them be, and that there is always strength to be found to carry on into the light of the coming day.

 

Well, that’s all folks!

The Man I Killed

For this next blog, I thought that it would be good if I talked about my lit circle book and explore in a similar format of my Reader Response Lit Circle role of what I thought about the book and some quotes and passages that I felt really helped bring out some of the work’s major underlying themes. But first, I have to say that my lit circle book, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, is tied for being my favorite book that we’ve read this year in AP Lit (it’s a tough call between this and Frankenstein) or all of my high school literature classes for that matter. I love how O’Brien has interwoven so many small stories following various characters in the past, present, and future, all of which connect together to bring out the trials afflicted on those who served in the Vietnam War, who deal with hardships not solely unique to war such as regret, lost, guilt, and pain, all of which help to bring out a greater commentary on the nature of this particular war and the brutal disillusionment surrounding it alongside the bitter repercussions that troubled everyone involved with it. One particular story that stuck out to me was “The Man I Killed”, which in a superficial overview is the telling of Tim O’Brien himself having thrown a grenade that left a young Vietnamese man with a “star-shaped hole that was red and yellow” (O’Brien. 120). While it is true that this incident is evidence toward O’Brien’s commentary on the ruthless violence of the Vietnam War that was a daily event for the soldiers humping along, that is only part of the commentary that leads toward understanding O’Brien’s overall themes. O’Brien interlaces the telling of his shock of having killed this man with telling the story of the Vietnamese man, who “was made fun of for his smooth skin and his love for mathematics. The young man could not make himself fight them...in the presence of his father and uncles, he pretended to look forward to doing his patriotic duty, which was also a privilege, but at night he prayed with his mother that the war might end soon. Beyond anything else, he was afraid of disgracing himself, and therefore his family and his village” (O’Brien. 121). This passage is critical in understanding O’Brien’s commentary about the war, because in this moment, he looks at the Vietnamese man and sees not only innocence compassion that has been tarnished by the sight of war, but also how someone an entire world away could have gone through the same exact circumstances and thought process that O’Brien himself had when he was drafted in 1968 for the war. O’Brien, like he does in many of the other stories, makes note of how this young man was just that: young, just like him and most other members of the Alpha Company who are fighting in the war. This was a war that was started by the authorities elders in political power seeking influence by proxy over others, but consumed the young, who as a result found their innocence stripped away from them and replaced by either unprecedented brutality of combat, or death itself. O’Brien makes the young Vietnamese man out to be a mirror image of himself, noting how the young man’s motivation of going to war for the sake of not so much patriotism, but fear of embarrassment and being judged and excommunicated by his family. For that, the young man would go to fight and find himself permanently excommunicated by the toss of a grenade by his feet. This section was also very important because it is the first time that the perspective of the other side is even speculated about. Up until this point, the Vietnamese had been more ambiguous and less easy to identify with. But here, O’Brien shows how the people that were killed were not native savages or alien invaders, but rather, just people who wanted in all their hearts to simply be at home with the people they love doing what they love most, but instead find themselves unwillingly fighting for a cause they don’t believe in.

Hope is the thing with feathers

To start off my set of blogs for this last month, I felt it best if I were to open up with a look into some poetry, looking at Emily Dickinson’s, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, a poet whose works I have not yet explored to the greatest extent but after reading through the poem felt it necessary to attempt to entail a few of Dickinson’s key elements within her work. As the title would suggest, Dickinson’s work is an extended metaphor, made clear by the opening lines of the work, which say, “"Hope" is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words And never stops—at all”. It does not take much analysis to reveal how Dickinson is using the extended metaphor of the bird to provide a visual and somewhat audial representation of hope, an idea which in it of itself transcends beyond the pages and be just as easily applicable to our own lives as any other time in history. The image of a bird being a symbol of hope could also be interpreted as a biblical allusion to Noah in Genesis, where following the great flood that lasted 40 days and nights, Noah sent out both a dove and a raven to determine if the waters had receded enough for landing, “When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth” (Genesis 8:11). Just like in Dickinson’s work, the dove of Noah served as a visual symbol that the greatest challenges that we face in this life can only be countered by the hope of there being an end to troubles and there being something better. It is more than just an emotion, but as Dickinson states, it becomes a personal embodiment in a person’s very soul, able to bring them out of whatever darkness or despair they may have been lost in and allow them to live again and, like Noah, know that there is rest for the wearied heart. But hope is not something that everyone wishes existed, as made evident by the second stanza, “And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—And sore must be the storm That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm”. No matter how different some of the most powerful “storms” across history have been, most all of them have the same goal of crushing hope because they know of its potency. Such is the true underlying reason for the brutality of various regimes and dictatorships over time, wishing that people could only see the raven that never returned, never to know of the dove that brought back the olive branch of life. The power of hope is something “that kept so many warm” as Dickinson put it, telling of how powerful hope truly is. In this way, hope can be seen as being like a fire, fueling and giving strength to those who go to it, and also serving as a beacon of light to guide the way. For all that hope does for people, Dickinson’s final stanza serves as a reminder of hope’s greatest attribute: it’s selflessness. She writes, “I've heard it in the chillest land And on the strangest Sea Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb—of Me”. Hope is something that is given in complete selflessness, never asking for sort of reparations, only wishing to see the fruits of its labor multiply. President Snow of The Hunger Games put it best by saying, “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear”.

Invisible Man: A Totalitarian Truth

For the final blog of the month, I wanted to use this space to take a deeper into some of the seminar notes I had come up with my our group’s presentation on Clifton-Riots from Invisible Man, which I felt I wasn’t able to voice very well due to time and well, a sore voice! Here, I want to look into the conversation, rather a key line, between Brother Jack and the Brotherhood against the Invisible Man following his speech at Clifton’s funeral, which is critical in bringing out some of Ellison’s finest commentary on the essence of the struggle between power and control. IM finds himself facing off against Brother Jack and the theoreticians of the Brotherhood, and in trying to explain himself to them Jack simply states, “If so, listen to me: you were not hired to think” (pg 469). Brother Jack’s words to IM are critical in understanding the nature of Ellison’s portrayal of manipulation and domination across the novel, which in essence is characterized by blind submissiveness. By saying that it is a blind submission and adherence is critical as well, as the idea of sight and blindness is also a key recurring thematic motif in the novel as well for this very reason. Looking at blindness in the novel, one only has to think of the two most prominent, the blind Reverend Barbee and the half-blind Jack, who find themselves literally impaired in their vision of what lies before them. However, with the IM, his blindness is found on a much more metaphorical level, as it is something that is impressed upon him by Jack and the Brotherhood, who would keep him blind to the outside world by making him out to a piece of clay, able to molded and sculpted into whatever they deem most fit or necessary for their circumstances. By IM saying that he is starting to think is, in the perspective of the Brotherhood, an attempted maneuver to undermine their authority and domination in IM’s attempt to try to mold himself and his own identity instead of having it all done for him by the Brotherhood. If one were to put it in more visual terms, IM is “Sambo the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down,-He’ll do the rest. Yes!” (pg 431). IM is nothing more than a doll to the Brotherhood who by speaking out during the funeral essentially tried to voice his own opinion and pull his own puppet strings. Not only this, but it was IM’s attempt to bring himself out of the blindness of thought and to try to see for himself, something that the Brotherhood noted as being quite dangerous. From a historical standpoint, this is the greatest caution and fear within a communist government, as uniqueness of thought is an immediate deviation away from the Marxist doctrine that is supposed to be followed and obeyed with religious piety. This was why Stalin purged out millions of his own people during his early 1930s collectivization of Russia and why he held the Great Purge Trials of upper level Politburo members, a fear of an undermining of authority. Those in power will do whatever it takes to maintain that role of reality for them, willing to provide whatever illusion for the common people to believe and accept as their petty truth so that they may stay in control. Until now, IM has believed that Brotherhood illusion to be his own personal reality and self-identity while Jack maintains supremacy, but in truth, Jack’s powerful line to IM is a shattering moment of realization for IM, when he finally gets it, that he is but the servant, and Jack the master.

One

For this next blog, I wanted to accomplish two things: first, I felt from my last poetry blog on post-World War I disillusionment that I ought to explore that idea again here, and second, to explore the ideas of loneliness, isolation, and the conceptual conflict between truth and illusion as are constantly found in Invisible Man which we are currently studying in class. To accomplish both these tasks, I looked to the lyrics of Metallica once again, this time those of “One”, a dreary thrash ballad with a powerful message hidden behind the words. The song’s lyrics are based off of the 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun by David Trumbo, ironically written the same year of the breakout of the Second World War. The story follows a World War I soldier who is hit by a landmine and nearly killed but survives despite having lost his arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouth, with his brain and mind kept perfectly intact, leaving him a prisoner of his mind. The impending result of such a horrendous atrocity of the war is a person who is trapped within himself, doomed to suffer from loneliness for the rest of his life, his only companion being his sporadic thoughts and dreams. The opening lyrics paint a chilling picture of the soldier’s condition, saying, “I can’t remember anything, can’t tell if this is true or dream, deep down inside I feel to scream, this terrible silence stops me”. Of these lines, the second about truth and dream, or rather what is and what seems, is what stood out to me, as like the anonymous narrator in Invisible Man, one of the greatest tragedies of life is not knowing how to tell the difference between the two, or worse, believing that a dream is the truth or vice versa. The disabled soldier is trapped in his own darkened mind, unable to experience the light of truth, and as a result can never know what is actually real. As the lyrics continue, it is revealed that there is one truth that the soldier knows: “There is not much left of me, nothing is real but pain now”. Pain, torment, and discomfort are the only truths that the soldier can ever identify with now because he has been denied everything that would have allowed him to experience any other sort of truth. Looking at this from a historical perspective, this is perhaps the greatest attribute of post-WWI disillusionment of the “Lost Generation”, that they had been exposed to what the world was really like. Four horrible years of a stalemated battle of trench warfare along the French border taught countless soldiers what life really consisted of, which was pain, suffering, and ultimately death. The chorus reveals the agony of what the war has brought on to the soldier, as he cries out, “Hold my breath as I wish for death, Oh please, God, wake me”. From a literary perspective, these lines are an interesting way to look at what the real nature of truth is. The soldier says “wake me”, alluding to him being caught within the illusion of his own mind as a result of his impairment, but if he were to be “awoken”, what would he wake up to? As countless other writers of the time like Hemingway and TS Eliot noted through their own works, the truth of the world that the soldier wishes to wake up to is not much better than the confines of his mind, as it is equally filled with pain, discomfort, and sorrow. Essentially, whether in the illusion of the mind or in the light of reality, there is no escape from pain, for it is a horror that plagues both imagination and reality. In a final analytical note, it is necessary to look at the line of the second chorus, “Now the world is gone, I’m just one”. Following the soldier’s failed suicide attempt after his tracheotomy and his denied request to be displayed on a tour to show people the physical atrocities of war, the soldier realizes that his destiny is in his hospital bed, the world essentially having past away from him and being the only “one” left. His fate is to fully experience isolation and loneliness, to never again be a part of the world, his only memory of it being of all the pain and suffering that it caused him. Ultimately, he will be “one” with torment and the bitter memories of the past. As the doctor puts it in the film, “This young man will be as unfeeling as the dead until the day he joins them”.

Invisible Man: A Crisis in Clifton

For this blog, after spending the past two days working on Invisible Man seminar research in class, I wanted to use the blog space to explore some points of analysis from the section my group was assigned for the assignment, which was looking at Brother Clifton’s fallout from the Brotherhood all the way to the final Chapter with the rioting in Harlem. More specifically, I wanted to analyze some of the comments that Anonymous makes to himself following Brother Clifton’s death after he resisted arrest, shot dead on the streets while selling the strange Sambo dolls. Perhaps before examining Brother Clifton himself, it is important to look at the Sambo dolls that he sells on the streets after going missing. In the words of Clifton, “Shake it up! Shake it up! He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down, He’ll do the rest Yes! He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you sigh” (Ellison. 431). The doll can easily be understood to be working as a foil to Anonymous and what the various elders and mentors of his life see him. The Sambo dolls are puppets, pulled by the strings of a puppet master in control and forced to do whatever it is told, with no thought given to what the puppet may want because the puppet is not actually human and therefore has no individual right to opinion or conduct of thought. In this way, Anonymous can very much be compared to being like the Sambo doll, constantly being pulled in various directions by the likes of Mr. Norton, Dr. Bledsoe, Brother Jack, and even Ras the Exhorter to a certain extent, all of whom refuse to acknowledge the individual identity of Anonymous since they know that his identity is linked to something greater than himself, and thus has no need for one. At this point in the novel, Anonymous does not so much identify his own personal manipulation by the Brotherhood and others in life, which will come following the Harlem riot realization, but correlates it more following Clifton’s brutal death as a fall out from history.  He reflects on the fallout saying, “I’d forget it and hold on desperately to the Brotherhood with all my strength. For to break away would be to plunge… to plunge” (Ellison. 435). Here, Anonymous refuses to look to Clifton’s death as a dreary foreshadowing to his own realizations about the Brotherhood, but instead backwardly uses it to solidify his own illusion of what the Brotherhood means to him. Anonymous is still desperate to maintain that the world that the Brotherhood shows before him is one of truth and reality, something Anonymous longs for following his first awakening after reading Dr. Bledsoe’s letter to Mr. Emerson, after which he promised himself to never let himself be manipulated again from the denial of truth. Yet here he is, with a new life and name within the Brotherhood, an organization that he has so much confidence in, he is willing to take on a new identity that is solely linked to it. In the opinion of Anonymous, Clifton fell out of history because he failed to identify with the history and truth that the Brotherhood had shown him, losing his identity and his life as a consequence. Anonymous is willing to do everything in his power to make sure that such a fallout does not happen to him, and in the process of doing this, he signs away what fragment of individual identity he may have had left by deciding to keep his parasitic relationship to the Brotherhood, something without which would kill him.

Killed Paive- July 8th 1918

For the first of my blogs this month, I decided to mix in some of what I’m learning in AP European History, the events surrounding the First World War, with my choice of a poem. For this month’s poem, I chose Ernest Hemingway’s poem Killed Paive-July 8^th 1918, one that heavily reflects on the perspective and attitude felt by many in the months before The Great War’s conclusion, which would leave an attitude of isolation and disillusionment, both of which would ultimately define the “Lost Generation” in the year to come. It is a bitter personal reflection, as Hemingway himself wrote this after being stationed in Paive, Italy in July 1918, a few months before the 11/11/1918 Armistice, and was an ambulance driver until he was severely wounded by a mortar shell. Hemingway begins his harrowing close-encounter with death with the opening lines, “Desire and all the sweet pulsing aches and gentle hurtings that were you”. Clearly, Hemingway is reflecting on who this soldier was as a person before he was ultimately found himself out on the front lines fighting a war. He reminds the reader of how each and every person who lost their life in the war isn’t just some number to be added to a long list of statistics, but a living, breathing, and amicable person, someone who had dreams and desires for how they wanted their life to be, just like any other person. Just like a person also they had their own heartaches and painful memories, but no matter how much we may not like to have these dreaded thoughts in our minds, it is what makes us all human, one of the key elements that helps to separate us away from mindless animals. The fact that Hemingway reminds us of just how human each and every soldier was is critical in regards to what he says next, “Are gone into the sullen dark”, because he now forces the reader to contrast the qualities of humanity with their absence. As the soldier finds himself nearing death, it is not just his body that will cease to exist, but who he was as a person as well. All the qualities of humanity, both the passionate desire for greatness alongside the pitfalls of pain and emotion, shall pass along into darkness and ceasing to exist. The final portion of the poem is a sad telling of the real event, in which when the mortar shell exploded, there was another soldier in between him and the shell, who was killed instantly while another had their legs ripped off. He hauntingly reflects on this experience by saying, “Now in the night you come unsmiling To lie with me A dull, cold, rigid bayonet On my hot-swollen, throbbing soul”. Hemingway’s lines here are a comparison between himself and the dead soldiers who now lie before him, seeing how cold and lifeless they have become in staunch comparison to his own pounding heart. Hemingway had a first-hand encounter with the atrocities of war, seeing how easily it consumes the lives of the soldiers forced to die on the front lines for a cause pressed onto them by their country. Even though the war would end in a few months, Hemingway knew from this moment onward that one can never really go back to how things were, and it seemed that through all the atrocities of war that he and everyone else in his generation felt a little less human in the years to come.

Hamlet: A Fascinating Finale

My last blog for this month comes on the same day that we finished reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet in class, so I felt for this blog that it would be good to share some of my initial thoughts to the dramatic and tragic conclusion of the play, and also look into what it has to offer to many of the underlying themes and motifs that have been developed over the course of the five Acts. Within Act V scene ii, the final act of the play, the described deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the actual deaths of Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet himself are witnessed, but there is still plenty of room to analyze for greater meaning behind each of the characters’ words and actions. Perhaps one of the most prominent moments is between Hamlet and Horatio before he goes off to exchange in dual with Laertes, in which Hamlet confides to his guard of him feeling the inevitable nature of his death to come and his readiness to accept this new course that Fate itself has set before him. Hamlet reflects, “But it is no matter…it be now, ‘tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come…let be” (V.ii.227…234-235...237). It is interesting to note here the demeanor and perspective with which he approaches death, something he has reflected upon in the past with fear and dread of the mysterious future that would await. Before destroying his relationship with Ophelia, Hamlet reflected on his views of death as “the dread of some undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” (III.i.86-87). Now, as he prepares to meet his destiny, he has an unusual calmness to him, seeming to accept himself and his fate willingly despite whatever death may have in store for him. Perhaps the greatest reason behind this is from the final line of the quote, “let be”, which seems to serve as an answer to the timeless question that Hamlet himself raised of “to be or not to be”. Over the course of the entire play, Hamlet has struggled with this conflict, going back and forth between “seeming” to be a man of insanity and irrationality while masking who he actually “is”, a man of integrity and wisdom. Now, as he prepares to meet his death, Hamlet comes to terms with himself and decides that if this is to be his end, he would himself die as the Hamlet that he knows himself to be and not what others may think or wish him to be. Hamlet hit upon the great fact of the “seem” vs. “is” argument, which is that ultimately the truth overcomes the illusion, but what remains the critical factor was the extent of the illusion and the damage that it has done to those involved. Hamlet sees now, before his mother, uncle, and Laertes even die, that time of “seem” must come to an end, that the walls of suspicion, lies, deceit and treachery that have stood as the crux and foundation of the entire play must all come crashing down if the kingdom is to be restored to its former state and liquidated of all that is “rank”. It is only fitting that all those whose actions inadvertently caused the state to deteriorate to where it is at the end are all dead, leaving only Horatio, perhaps the only man to act out of true reason, alive to tell the tragic tale. Hamlet’s purge of rankness in the kingdom would claim his own life as well, and leave the kingdom open to a man untainted by the poison of the previous kingdom, perhaps in the hopes that a new one can be rebuilt and be fruitful and the memory of the time of the rankness of Denmark be forgotten.

Master of Puppets

After having read through the first three acts of Hamlet and having to search for various recurring themes and motifs that Shakespeare inserts that help bring about a greater meaning of the work itself, I found that one of the key recurring ideas of the play is that of struggle of power and the manipulation of people in various circumstances to make them work to satisfy some sort of personal gain. With this thought in mind, I immediately thought of the lyrics to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” as being of large relevance to this idea, since this song, along with every other song on the album, lyrically focus on the ideas of the loss of control and the abuse of power, both of which can be easily identified within the context of Hamlet as well. The song most explicitly explores manipulation and the struggle for control of one’s own fate in the context of drug abuse, making it very clear from the beginning what the real danger is behind letting substances like these become the driving force of one’s life. After a blistering iconic introduction, James Hetfield fiercely opens with the lines, “End of passions play, crumbling away, I’m your source of self-destruction”. From the beginning, it is made very clear just how real and terrifying drug addiction really is, and ultimately how scary the idea of becoming a slave to something against your will can really be. And while the lyrics may only seem to cover the pitfalls of substance abuse, they in fact can be applied to life itself, how it is that so many people find themselves pulled in various directions by fate and forces outside their control. The ‘strings’ of fate that pull people against there are directly identified in the chorus, “Master of puppets I’m pulling your strings, twisting your mind and smashing your dreams, blinded by me you can’t see a thing, just call my name because I’ll hear you scream”. With these lines, it is impossible not to think of the cover of the album, which shows a line of crosses in a cemetery, each with strings on them which are being held by two hands coming down from the sky. Every person in life likes to believe themselves to be their own ‘master of puppets’, believing in the idea that they can control their destiny or even manipulate others and pull on someone else’s strings. But in reality, we are all slaves to a master of some sort, destined to have our lives determined by a force that will consume our lives until the day we find ourselves resting below a cross in a cemetery. Each person has a different master, like the song describing how drugs ultimately consume a person’s life until death, forever destined to both hate their slavery to this materialistic master, yet loving the temporary pleasure it gives. This idea is represented musically in the song, as it is unabashed heavy riffs until the middle of the song, where it recedes into the melodic and somewhat classical bridge. Perhaps this is a representation of the drug addict having tried to free himself from the tumult that comes alongside being a slave to drugs, and stops using them for a while. But as the intensity and anger builds back up again in the song, it is apparent that there can be no true freedom while under the oppressive rule of the master, and it isn’t long until the song returns to full intensity and thus the power of the puppet master returns with full force. The victim screamed out in agony to the puppet master, “Fix me!” returning back to the drugs that keep him a slave to the master. As the puppet is under full control of the master, he is susceptible to whatever the master wants, seen through the lines, “I will occupy, I will help you die, I will run through you, now I rule you too”. These lines allow for the inference that the puppet reached a full point of being consumed by the master, so much that it was unable to retain a separate life of its own, and as a result died to become part of the master. Such is the fate of all people tied to their personal masters, destined to be consumed by forces that they cannot control which came about as a result of their own actions. Perhaps this is why the song ends with sinister laughter, as the dead puppet is mocked for having created the ties to the puppet master in the first place.

Hamlet: The Art of Illusion

Over the course of a rather hectic week between snow storms and a 4-day weekend, I worked in some time to read through Act III of Hamlet, which essentially consisted of Hamlet destroying all bonds of affection between himself and Ophelia, the performance of the play which mimics Claudius’s killing his brother the king, Hamlet’s scathing remarks to his mother and in his rage killing Polonius, and finally Claudius and his futile attempt to pray to God to forgive his sins. While there are obviously several different places to pick apart the key analytical points of the four scenes and bring out a “so what” toward the overall meaning of Shakespeare’s work, I wanted to focus on the continued motif of the play and the stage in this Act, found in Scene 2 where Hamlet is lecturing one of the players about the execution of his upcoming performance. By observing Hamlet’s criticism of what it means to “seem” the role of a player upon the stage, there is subtle insight into the protagonist’s own mind as he struggles to fight off his inner demons and carry out his own performance of madness for Ophelia, Gertrude, and everyone else he comes into contact with. He begins his criticism by telling the player to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (III.ii.20-21). While ‘nature’ most often finds its context in either describing the outside world, here it takes on two other refreshingly different meanings, and while Hamlet gives these instructions to someone else, they actually better reflect the young Prince himself. Here, ‘nature’ can be better connoted to mean a combination of qualities that make up the identity of a human being. With this new understanding, Hamlet seems to be telling the player to not overstep his own boundaries as a person, something that reflects on Hamlet, who also finds himself as a player over the course of the play. It seems here that Hamlet is inadvertently attempting to tell himself how he needs to be careful in his own acting, as to not go over the line in which he loses sense of who he is. Perhaps he partially feels himself losing control of this aspect, having just harshly condemned his past lover Ophelia to a nunnery, he must struggle to keep his own self in check. ‘Nature’ also has a theological connotation, dealing with a state of being in which there is a lack of grace. Again, this idea can applied to Hamlet’s situation as in his act of “seeming” to be someone that he really isn’t, he must be wary to not cross any religious lines with himself. We have seen this before, with God being the only thing that holds Hamlet back from killing himself, and we see it later in scene 3, where Hamlet has the opportunity to strike down Claudius when he appears to be praying, but refuses “to take him in the purging of his soul” (III.iii.90). In this way, Hamlet reveals how he rather difficultly continues to maintain his own personal moral compass in his act of illusion. In final thought, Hamlet’s instruction to the player is layered with an insight onto the purpose of acting itself, which he describes by saying, “from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her [own] feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.21-26). Hamlet entreats the player to what he believes to be the very point and purpose to what both of them are taking part in, which is to use illusion to both criticize and reflect upon the current state of reality. What is perceived to be false can mirrored and reflected to reveal truth. Here Hamlet inadvertently reminds the audience why he is doing what he is doing, not just with the play conducted by the players, but the entire façade of madness that Hamlet has been acting out since his interaction with the ghost. Hamlet has the desire to take the essential elements of the world that is around him (nature) and remind everyone what it really is. It is somewhat of a ‘fight fire with fire’ mentality, casting off the illusions of what reality is by creating an alternate one, but it serves the point to reflect a true state of being. That is what Hamlet’s goal is with the play-within-a play about to be put on, and it is also what his goal is with his own personal illusion of madness.

Eldorado

For this blog, I felt it would be as good a time as any to talk about a poem, so for that I decided to go back to a familiar name that I’ve already looked at a couple times in older posts: Edgar Allan Poe. To delve into the fascinating world of Poe, I chose Eldorado, one of his last writings and published only months before his death in 1849. It is a fitting poem written by a man nearing the inevitable end of life’s journey to be about someone to be also on a quest toward a greater goal. The poem opens up in a manner somewhat outside of Poe’s norm, as it seems to evoke thoughts of medieval tales of King Arthur’s court or “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, saying, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado”. While it is only natural to imagine a shining knight traversing along dangerous pathways to discover the hidden treasures of the long lost city of gold, there is in fact another story being told here, revealed in the end. Each and every person, like the brave knight, ceaselessly traverses through “sunshine and shadow”, through times of joy and times of grief, in order to seek out that which they desire most, something that is different for every person. Poe also identifies a harsh reality toward each person’s internal strive toward their treasure, that many times it is never found. The knight in the poem, “grew old-This knight so bold-And o'er his heart a shadow Fell as he found No spot of round That looked like Eldorado”. Poe’s description of the knight who has spent his entire life scourging for the riches of the earth may seem foolish and rather silly to the modern reader, who scoff at the idea of someone devoting their entire life to the slim chance of discovering physical and ephemeral greatness. But as much many refuse to believe, people have not changed all that much over time, as we what drove men and women to pursue ideas and goals are relatively the same today. The greatest of these is greed, the desire to own much more than is necessary. One does not need to think very hard to determine that greed still drives people, cities, and countries toward greatness, and naturally, toward their own destruction. People never stop dreaming about all that they wish they could acquire over the course of their lifetime, burdened with the task of filling the void within their own hearts with the material desires of this world. Such is where the knight is as well when the shadow falls upon him, and he asks where to find Eldorado. In reply, the shadow says, “"Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride, "The shade replied-"If you seek for Eldorado!"” As the shadow bellows out his spur of knowledge to the aged knight, one would think that this would give the seeker a sense of closure in knowing that even though his journey must go on, he will eventually find Eldorado. But this is not the case. Instead there is an implied feeling that there is no Eldorado, that the physical treasures that the knight pursued and sought out over the course of his entire life in the fragmented hope of finding gold, have all been for nothing. The treasures of this world blinded the knight to what true treasure really is, which is that which transcends beyond the physical world and into the intellectual and even spiritual. The true treasures to be find could be anything from knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to religion or God, all of which are true treasures that can never be measured by physical means, but instead are measured by how it is that they can transform our lives in a way that money never could and never will.

Hamlet: The Extent of Obligation

For my final blog for this month, I felt it only necessary to address the second work that I am reading in AP Lit class, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. While the classic tale has had its fair share of modern incarnations through film and other works, the original text (or texts depending on the other versions of the play) creates critical questions that to this day remain incredibly difficult to answer, as seen by multiple scenes of the characters themselves asking questions to one other. To be more specific, I wanted to expand on one of the key words that we have been indexing throughout the play thus far, which is “duty”. The idea of fulfilling a role or obligation to someone or being bound by law to complete a task is a concept that is constantly present throughout the first act alongside the beginning of the second, which is how much of the play that we have covered. From the guard’s declaration of “Our duty to your Honor” (I.ii.275) toward their Prince Hamlet, to Ophelia’s sullen response “I shall obey, my lord” (I.iii.145) toward her prying father Polonius, complying to the will of another is an idea that Shakespeare expounds upon through his characters. Perhaps the most notable example of moral obligation, and the one that sparks a hefty moral question, is that with Prince Hamlet and his ghostly King, where the deceased father incites his son to enact revenge on his cunning uncle Claudius who murdered him the orchard. In response to his father’s charge, young Hamlet declares “thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with base matter” (I.v.109-111). Through these words, Hamlet declares that he shall dedicate his entire being toward fulfilling his duty to his dead father and the newfound charge he has been given, setting aside all other obligations he may need to fulfill for the sole satisfaction of this one. In this way, the morality of the concept of duty and obligation is brought into question. While Hamlet does in fact feel compelled by his honor to commit an act of vengeance against his uncle, should he not question the virtue and morale behind his actions? To what extent can obligation be carried out without comprising the moral integrity of the person appointed with the task? It is interesting to note how Hamlet lamented in the king’s hall earlier about why “the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst [self-slaughter]” (I.ii.135-136), dreading how the commandments of God were the only thing keeping him among the world of the living. In his duty to God, Hamlet was willing to give up his selfish wish of taking his own life in order to maintain his moral integrity. However, Hamlet seems to have no problem breaking his service to the Lord when it comes to adhering to a new duty that his dead father has enlisted him into, something that goes directly against the Bible. Romans 12:19 explicitly states “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord”. As a man who knows God’s thoughts on suicide, Hamlet is also certain to know what God has to say about revenge, but is willing to compromise his faith to satisfy his inner demons that long for hate and revenge against his Uncle Claudius, and have been stirred up by his father’s apparition. Through Hamlet, Shakespeare poses the question of not necessarily of who we are all duty-bound to serve, but what obligations we are willing to break in order to satisfy our own internal desires and ambitions.

 

All Woods Must Fail

For this next blog, I really wanted to return to the world of JRR Tolkien to simply examine his poetic excerpts from works like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and see all that they have to offer outside the context of the story and what overall message they have for each of us to hear. When trying to decide which poem to pick, I found one that truly relates to my life at this moment, caught up in the entangled branches of work, school, friends, family, and anything else that might get thrown my way. Tolkien’s All Woods Must Fail seems to speak to this very concept, recognizing the weariness of the wooded world that we all get lost in at some point in our lives, while at the same time providing the glimmer of hope that an end to our troubles will one day come and we will be able to leave the shadowed world of woods far behind. The poem is taken from The Lord of the Rings and serves as an encouraging thought to the hobbits, who are nearing the end of the Old Forest that they have been lost in. It opens by saying, “O! Wanderers in the shadowed land/Despair not! For though dark they stand, All woods there be must end at last”. While the context in which this poem is derived from is from a very literal interpretation and standpoint, I believe that Tolkien’s writing transcends past the story to take on a metaphorical and even biblical interpretation. Frodo and company may have been literal wanderers through the forest, but for the rest of us throughout daily life, we have our own forests that have heavy shadows cast over them. Whether it’s the bustling hallways of a crowded high school, the narrow side-by-side cubicles in a resented job, or even our own homes at times, we all know scarily well the places where the light is shut out and we are trapped by our own surroundings of darkness. In these times, the world seems like a cruel, bitter, and cold place, but Tolkien fervently writes to reminds us that this is not the end, that to “all woods there be must end at last/and see the open sun go past”. Through these words, a Biblical interpretation could be validated, not surprising since Tolkien himself was a fervent Christian. From the start, the “shadowed land” could refer to our own world plagued with sin and death, where so many wander aimlessly without the knowledge of God and those that do know him are constantly beaten down by the world and work to their full extent to cast aside the encroaching shadows. But there is still hope with the coming of the “open sun”, referring not only to the physical light to cast away darkness, but also to the coming of Christ that is to wipe all shadows from the earth. Even if it may be difficult to see, there is an end to the woods, and because of that knowledge of what is at the end of the woods we cannot let ourselves be trapped by the forest, but pursue our way through it, and charge headlong to the end where the sun can be revealed in all its glory. Tolkien ends the poem almost prophetically, pronouncing, “For east or west all woods must fail”. Again, here is a beacon of hope to those trapped within their own forests, reminding them that all woods must fail and give way to the open fields where the sun shines brightly across a clear blue sky. For that reason, we must remember that all woods must fail.

 

 

All Woods Must Fail

by J R R Tolkien

O! Wanderers in the shadowed land
Despair not! For though dark they stand,
All woods there be must end at last,
And see the open sun go past:
The setting sun, the rising sun,
The day's end, or the day begun.
For east or west all woods must fail.

 

 

I Sit and Think

While trying to think of a poem to write about for my next blog, I immediately had the realization that I have not made a single mention of my favorite author: JRR Tolkien. While I am obviously a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Simillarion, and all things Middle-Earth related, I wanted to explore a different side of Tolkien that not too many people seem to appreciate, which is that of his poetry. To begin the exploration, I chose “I Sit and Think” by Tolkien, because I saw it as a powerful and personal reflection that is equally moving and mesmerizing because of its somber perspective of both the life that has been lived, and the future of the world to come. The poem opens by creating a beautiful backdrop to the narrator sitting there; something that immediately evokes the ornate sceneries and landscapes that Tolkien created across the rolling pastures of the Shire and the blinding white capped Misty Mountains. But alongside the harmonious images lavishly painted across the words there is also a reflection of how much things have changed over the course of a lifetime, as he recalls “meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been/of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were”. However wonderful the sights may have been to the narrator, he now realizes that they are simply just a memory of a time that has long passed, one where the beauty of the past can never equate to what he sees now. Here Tolkien himself can easily be inserted as the narrator, being one whose life spanned across nearly three quarters of the twentieth century, where several technological changes occurred that began to replace the beauty of the natural world with that of industry and advancement. It is both a reflective and harrowing thought to think of how much the world has changed before one’s own eyes, and even scarier to think of what will become of the world when one’s own chapter draws to a close. Such are the narrator’s thoughts when he pictures, “a spring that I shall [n]ever see”. Life will go on without us, however much we may not wish it to, but such is the way of the world, and so it shall continue. An even greater thought is of how even when we are gone, the people that we know will still carry on with their lives and continue to experience all that this world has to offer. Tolkien touched on thought within his other writing in The Return of the King, when Frodo prepares to leave for the Grey Havens and tells Samwise how his, “part of the Story goes on” (1006). In the same way, Tolkien muses again “of people long ago/ and people who will see a world that I shall never know”, a sad truth that all must come to terms with after the twilight of life has passed over. But until the final moment comes when all of this must finally come true, the narrator returns to his peaceful reflections that he reveled in earlier, all the while “listen[ing] for returning feet and voices at the door”. Personally, I think that those feet and voices are those of either children or grandchildren who come to visit him, spending as much time with the narrator as they can before his inevitable parting. Ultimately, I think the greatest message behind this poem is to enjoy the fleeting moments of life, and to not dread the unknown of the future, but revel in your chance to have a chapter of life that was well worth living.

 

I Sit And Think

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.

© J R R Tolkien. All rights reserved

 

 

 

 

Invisible Man: An Opening Observation

It’s a new year, and one thing that means is a whole new set of books to read for AP Lit, the first of which being Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. With this book, I feel it necessary to make a blog similar to my first one on The Age Innocence, that is, one where I look at the prologue and first chapter of the text and recite my initial thoughts and ideas on what some of the major underlying themes could possibly be and examine how they could work into the overall meaning of the book itself. Ralph Ellison, through his nameless narrator, explores the culture of 1950s America, a culture that America would like to forget that it was ever a part of, which is one of brutal racial discrimination and bigotry. It was also one that would have a devastating effect on those who were forced to suffer through the ceaseless physical and verbal torture of living in a society that thought them to be not fully human. From the first few lines in the prologue, the narrator decries in a lament how he is “surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination…everything and anything except me” (Ellison. 3). The ‘invisible man’ that the narrator calls himself is one who is ignored by society and that constantly has the views, opinions, and judgments of others pressed upon him. For that he remains eternally marginalized by society, never to be fully accepted because he can never be fully seen for how he really is as a person. From the start Ellison already begins to emphasize the idea of sight and vision and how they both tie into the question of reality. The narrator comments on this himself, saying he must “walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to… [For] there are few things in the world as dangerous” (Ellison 5). The narrator remarks how everyone else around him is trapped inside the illusion of their dreams, blind to truth of reality that awaits them if they were to open their eyes and see the light of day for themselves. But instead, they choose to stay locked away in their fantasy, where they believe to have a tight grip of control over life, a falsehood that the narrator recognizes would be better left undisturbed. This is also why the narrator is so physically attracted to the light, because it “confirms my reality, gives birth to my form” (Ellison. 6). With every light that he surrounds himself with in the hotel basement, the narrator can rest assured that it is he who remains surrounded by the truth and enlightenment that comes with the light, much like the freed prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” who reveled in the free air and sun burning bright in the sky that helped him to identify it is as truth and all the past shadows in the cave as mere illusions. To conclude, I want to step outside the Prologue and delve into Chapter 1, where there were several key analytical points that need to be discussed. In short, the chapter revolves around the narrator having given a graduation speech and is called to give it at a ballroom with other classmates, but turns into a battle royal in which the blacks are forced to fight each other for entertainment. But before they are forced to fight, a naked blonde struts across the ring and is eyed out by all the men and is barely able to escape from the hands of the drunk men surrounding her. To the woman the narrator thinks, “I wanted at the same time to run from the room…or go to her and cover…to love her and murder her, to hide from her” (Ellison 19). I feel like this moment is important because it shows both how the narrator hates how he is falling to the same lustful desires as the vicious white men who have propped him up in the ring, but that also he sees a bit of himself in that woman. He sees a person who has been propped up solely for the entertainment of others, and a person who will never be valued for whatever they may have to offer on any moral or intellectual grounds, but instead will be forced to adhere to strict physical appearance. And just like the woman, he is ultimately doomed to fall to the hands of the cruel upper white men and forced to do whatever they want, which for him meant being forced to fight other blacks and forced to kneel onto an electrocuted rug in a vain attempt to grab some money. The narrator knows after seeing the blonde woman, that they are both doomed to suffer the same curse of invisibility.