The English Moot Blog
A moot-blog for English students to discuss and debate literature and life.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Brave New World: Society Today
Brave New World: The Role of the Savage
Brave New World: Implications of Absolute Government Control
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Life of Pi: Brutality
"I stabbed him repeatedly. His blood soothed my chapped hands. His heart was a struggle - all those tubes that connected it. I managed to get it out. It tasted delicious, far better than turtle. I ate his liver. I cut off great pieces of his flesh. He was such an evil man. Worse still, he met evil in me - selfishness, anger, ruthlessness. I must live with that. Solitude began. I turned to God. I survived."
This quote really caught me off guard. I was surprised by the transformation of a young vegetarian boy that was so committed to religion into a monster. Pi's original good nature was so quickly lost to an ease of cannibalism and this really made me think of how much an event can change a person. “It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing" I did not expect this book to be so gruesome and have parts of cannibalism and murder from the knowledge that I had of the book prior to reading it. This passage really shows the brutality of humanity how people can change so easily with necessity.
Life of Pi
Life of pi has 100 chapters and is divided into 3 parts. Part number one tells the story of pi’s life before and after an unnamed horrifying event that caused great suffering to Pi. Part number two describes in great detail the event not spoke of in the first part. Part number three begins by investigators asking Pi questions, Pi telling the story of part number two and this part ends, the book ends with the investigators opinion on the story and the main characters life. I really liked the format of this book. The last part tying the whole book together by starting before the first part, and adding the second part in the middle of it in chapter 97 “the story” made the book more interesting to me. Another aspect I liked of the book was the use of listing. Throughout part two there was a lot of repetition, and although this made some of the book hard to read, I found that this really portrayed the sense of boredom and urge to survive that Pi was feeling.
Life of Pi: Unique Conclusion
"As an aside, story of sole survivor, Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."
This passage is the last paragraph of Life of Pi. I thought it was an appropriate ending, because it fundamentally represents Mr. Okamoto accepting Pi's first story, and by extension, accepting God and not accepting humans and purely animalistic species. Pi presents Mr. Okamoto with the possibility of shaping life as one would like to, seeing it in its most beautiful form. While Mr. Okamoto believed Pi's second, more tragic and horrible story, he prefers the first, and so Pi tells him to believe that one. It is not clear what choice Mr. Okamoto makes, until this final paragraph, which shows him accepting the tiger story which he at first finds so hard to believe. This passage made the meaning of the book clear to me. Although before reading the book, I was not expecting this book’s ending to be what it was. I really enjoyed this conclusion and made the book very unique.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Clockwork Orange language: Nadsat
weak parenting, no control
This is the scene where the state of Alex's family is revealed. His parents live in fear of him and although they have suspicions of his late night criminal activities they are too scared to do anything about it. When his father tries to know what is going on at night, Alex quickly shuts him down. He is just a ruthless child who goes unopposed, no one is able to confront him and punish him for his criminal actions. This shows the state the society is in, violent youths are uncontrollable and even their own parents can't do anything to stop them.
Clockwork: violence
The violence in this novel really caught me off guard. The gang of four led by Alex, find their first victim of the night, an old man walking out the library with books. They circle the innocent man and after a bit of verbal harassment they proceed to savagely beat the old man. The gang's love of violence is shown as the narrater (Alex) comments on the beauty of how blood came out of his mouth. Anthony Burgess describes the beating of an oldman in horrific detail. This quote shows the readers a glimpse upon how violent the city youths have become and the problem this society is facing.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
A Place Called Home For Dean Makepeace
Dean Makepeace could not settle to the new lifestyle with his sister (Margaret) and after realizing how attached he had become to the environment of his former school, he feels convinced to return with all odds against him. Obviously he could not return as Dean, though being a teacher satisfied that desire equally. The final sentence of this novel, 'His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him' (page 195) left me thinking for a while who the father was and who the son was between the new Dean and Makepeace. The quote contributed the importance of Makepeace's forty years as Dean which became his real life.
Ayn Rand Visit Is Unreal
The narrator denies to accept this perspective because I believe he is influenced for his admiration for a writer that he has never seen but only write.
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Ending
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Blame
The Wars and Animals
Thursday, April 14, 2011
A Crucial Point
Diction in Angela's Ashes
An Interesting Point of View
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Loss of Innocence
The Beast
The Conch
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Antigone #3
Character Observations
- sharp-tongued
- manipulative – pg 190
- willing to take control
- risky, brave
- loyal, family oriented
- secretive
- uses a sarcastic tone – pg 193
- motivated
- religious
Ismene
- deliberately ignorant
- cautious
- pessimistic
- follows by the laws
Creon
- power struck
- changed a lot since Oedipus was king
- became a tyrant
- seems to be a big threat especially with the proclamation
- politically talented
- impatient very quickly
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Love is like a Paperclip.
Elizabeth Austen
Sarcasm: A Coping Mechanism
Saturday, April 2, 2011
The Shame
Between a rock and a hard place
The Wonder of Life
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
The End Result
Khaled Hosseini
Monday, March 21, 2011
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Sarah's Key
"As she looked at Eva and her mother, the girl wondered if her parents had been right to protect her from everything, if they had been right to keep disturbing, bad news away from her. If they had been right not to explain why so many things had changed for them since the beginning of the war. Like when Eva's husband never came back last year. He had disappeared. Where? Nobody would tell her. Nobody would explain. She hated being treated like a baby. She hated the voices being lowered when she entered the room. If they had told her, if they had told her everything they knew, wouldn't that have made today easier?"
This quotation also, connects with secracy. The parents chose to hide the information about the war and what was going on to protect Sarah's innoncence, and not get her involved with grown-up troubles. This is just the beginning to a book filled with "key" secrets and "key" events.
Sarah's Key
Sarah's Key
Velodrome d'Hiver a.k.a La Grande Rafle
Early on the morning of July 16th, 1942, the French police, acting under orders from the German Gestapo, took over 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children from their beds. Most of the adults were sent directly to the concentration camp at Drancy, while parents with children remained at the Velodrome d'Hiver, an indoor stadium used for bicycle races and other various events, for days without food. While the Jewish families waited inside the hot stadium with no washrooms or places to sleep the French police scanned the city of Paris for the remainder of the Jews that were to be brought to the stadium. For six days straight the horrified prisoners of the Velodrome d'Hiver endured physical indignity while French police stood by doing nothing to prevent the future genocide. After a week at the stadium all Jews were shipped to different concentration camps across France and Germany where they were seperated from their families and murdered.
This was a shameful time in history for France that is rarely talked about today, and will always be remembered through De Rosnay's story, Sarah's Key.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
HEART OF DARKNESS: THE CRITICS
Criticism of Joseph Conrad’s famous work is extensive. Many critics accuse Conrad as being an imperialist, a sexist, and a racist; I would like to focus on the latter. Conrad, a racist – many feel he is simply a product of his era. Most Europeans during this time denied any possibility that Africans could have their own culture. Europeans dominated and dehumanized the Africans. Chinua Achebe, an African, criticizes Conrad as an “extreme” racist. Achebe blames Conrad for playing into the Western world’s stereotyping of Africa. He believes that Conrad is prejudice of both his country and his people. He claims that Conrad held views that dehumanize Africans, their “savage” behaviour, and accuses him of encouraging Africans to be “in their place” which included performing activities such as singing, shouting etc. Also, Achebe states that Conrad attempted to create a barrier between himself and the characters by using a framed narrative, a story within a story, to resist exposure. Achebe’s accusations of Conrad being unquestionably racist are met by Wilson Harris, who comes to Conrad’s defence by saying, “he missed the point”. Harris believes the novella can be read as racist but it was made this way on purpose. He believes that Heart of Darkness is a parody; everything that the character says and thinks from the European’s colonial attitude, to his protagonist’s condescending sympathies, is intentional. Harris states that Conrad does his job so well that as a result he appears racist. Harris believes that Achebe is unable to comprehend the depth of what Conrad has written. Harris accuses Achebe of being biased and critical of any literature that is not written by an African. Achebe does not acknowledge Conrad’s message. The novella is not about a journey into the heart of the Congo, but rather a journey into the soul of man. This human experience is what Conrad is talking about. Harris believes the characters needed a place to go and where better than the unexplored part of the world to discover one’s soul.