Literature Analysis Notes

My Literature Analysis book, Death of a Salesman, was pretty good.  It delves into the mind of a middle-class worker in America who tries to achieve the American Dream.  He ultimately fails and commits suicide, seeing as he could never provide for his family or be the man he wanted his son to see him as.  He slowly goes insane throughout the book and talks to memories of people in his life instead of the people who are actually there.  The theme of this book is the disillusionment of the American dream and how this is an unachievable ideal.  This causes a man to become disillusioned with life as he realized he was promised something that could never exist and never existed in the first place.  He can no longer live life based on the fact that he will never become the ideal nuclear family that is shown throughout this time in history.  He realizes that life isn't an ideal and can't live with that.  This ultimately leads to his demise.

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Socratic Seminar Notes

I took notes but what I took from the discussion was that you can't always do what you love so sometimes you have to love what you do.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

1. During the beginning of WWI a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of school children. At first the children are over joyed by their separation from civilization and order. They build a small society. As their time on the island rolls on they begin to speculate of a ''monster'' that lurks in the surrounding woods. Their paranoia soon engulfs the clan and the turn on each other. Just as all hell is about to break loose, they are rescued by a passing navy vessel. 

2. The theme of Lord of the Flies tackles the all to present human emotion of fear and paranoia. Both play an extreme roll in someone's ability to survive. In times of extreme isolation any little bump in the night can send a person into a downward spiral. Its about not letting your fear swallow and consume what makes you human to begin with. Your sense of reason, ability to discern reality from the imagination, and problem solving. 

3. William Golding wrote in a dark underlying tone. On the surface it might seem like just another adventure/cast away story. But if you read deeper into it there is a very present sense of darkness. They boys on the island begin to worship a pigs head on a spear. They call it ''lord of the flies'' because of all the flies the severed head attracted. However ''lord of the flies'' translated into latin (Beelzebub) means Satan or Prince of demons. If that right there isn't a red flag, I'm not sure what is. The boys also speak of a monster they believe exists in the surrounding forrest. Their fear of this monster leads them to kill one of their own because they mistook him for it. 

4. There were a lot of metaphors and similes in the story. I already mentioned the pigs head on the spear as a metaphor for the devil. The island itself was a representation of hell. Last but not least, the sailor who rescues them in the final chapter was described dressed in all white and standing on the beach as the morning sun finally brought light to the island. That could be symbolic of a salvation of sorts. With the sailor being God or an angle. The characterization of the characters (that sounds a little redundant) was fairly cryptic at times. One character was described as fat and wore glasses. His real name was never said. The rest of the children called him Piggy. This lends credence the tone being very dark and uncaring at times. 

The Raven Poetry Elements

Dramatic Situation: The speaker is a man in an early 1800's Victorian setting.
Structure: The poem is broken up into 18 stanzas with 6 lines each.  No discernible syllable count.  always ends each stanza with "-more"
Theme: The poem has to do with life and death as does a lot of Poe's work.
Grammar and Meaning: This guy is talking to a raven, symbol for death, in a common dialect of English which makes the poem easily understood.
Important Images:  Images of the Gods, and heaven, as well as the darkness of his house and the raven.  The altar above his door and the bust of the Goddess Athena are also important.
Important single words: Heaven, Gods, Nevermore, Lenore
Tone:  very dark and ominous
Literary devices: metaphor, allusion, symbol, simile
Prosody:  implores an ABABBB rhyme pattern which creates a nice flow while reading the poem.

Micro AP Essay

I expected to be writing an essay using Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities as textual support.  I am decent at writing standardized essays, so that was easy.  It was difficult to think of textual support since the book wasn't in front of me to quote and I could merely summarize what happened.  I didn't learn anything new about the AP questions that you haven't already learned or knew.  I work fine under pressure which has never been an issue and I normally finish the multiple choice or the essays with time to spare.  The actual exam will require time and effort to pass.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

1.  Holden Caulfield is a teenage boy who tells the story of the weekend he spent in New York before he went to a mental hospital for treatment.  He is sixteen years old and is bored of school and all the people around him.  He gets angry, as teenagers do, and decides to run away.  He goes to Manhattan and checks into his hotel.  Holden can't help but judge everyone around him, because he is a teenager.  He thinks that everyone around him are phonies because everything they do is not altruistic and they are just trying to move up in life instead of doing things that they want to do.  Holden swears a lot, because he is a teenager.  Holden is also very angsty, a very stereotypical teenager characteristic, because Holden is a teenager.  He also likes to talk about himself, because he is a teenager and the world revolves around him.  If anyone ignores him, it makes Holden feel like he is alone in the world and will more than likely think that that person is a phony, but it really isn't their fault because Holden likes talking about ducks in  a pond, which is a very uninteresting topic, so he should stop blaming other people and talk about something interesting if he wants people to listen.  This is when Holden puts on his red hunting cap which is a metaphor throughout the book about how Holden protects himself from the world, because yet again Holden is angsty and a teenager.  He buys a hooker and tries to talk to cab drivers but no one cares.  No one cares because he is a teenager and the world does not revolve around him but Holden never learns this or anything really throughout the novel because he is a teenager.
2.  The theme of this book is that teenagers suck at life.  Teenagers are emotional yet reserved.  They think that sharing their emotions is a sign of weakness and that no one would listen to them anyway so they stay quiet as a way to protect them self from getting hurt.  Holden demonstrates this throughout the entire novel with his angst and the red hunting cap.
3.  The author's tone was aimless.  This was not a traditional story with a beginning middle, climax, and  an end.  Instead it is just a lot of exposition.  The reader learns more about Holden throughout the novel without it really advancing any kind of story.  There is also no moment of resolving the problem because this is a realistic story where problems are just magically solved through deus ex machina, instead life just continues and the problems are always there.  The book also just ends with no real resolution once again because life just continues without any exciting ending.  This is because it was written in the 1950's during the Lost Generation, where people, after World War II, felt lost in their own world and just got drunk a lot (see Ernest Hemingway).  This led to a plethora of classic authors who wrote about a person living life aimlessly moving thorough life without any overarching plot line.
4.  The book uses tone, metaphors, characterization, dialogue, and irony to convey the themes in the book.