Coming of Blog

When reading the chapter titled "Maggot" in Black Swan Green , I noticed a common recurrence that the adult figures in the story wished to use violent or aggressive means to fix the issues of kids, but were forced to restrain themselves. I think that this is representative of the growing allure of violent means for Jason to enact his revenge on Ross Wilcox. The first instance of this restraint is how angry Mr. McNamara gets after Ross and his boys run over the bridge and skip class. He doesn't resort to violence, but his pure rage prompts Jason to envision a headline in which he drowns Ross' gang. Fighting back is clearly on Jason's mind. The second instance is when Mr. Nixon says that back in his day, a "sound thrashing" would've taught the boys a lesson about speaking back to authority. At the end of the chaper, the bus driver encourages Jason to slice Ross Wilcox's sinews, which is quite gruesome. Together, these adults with violent intentio

Mr. Mitchell made a comment in class the other day about Jason's masterful use of italics in Black Swan Green , so I thought I'd go through the first few pages and see what the fuss was all about. The first use of italics is the line " Do  not set foot in my office ". The italics in this instance simply give weight to the statement, but what's interesting is the lack of italics on the word "not", which somehow makes the word feel even heavier than its surroundings despite the fact that all it does is transition back to normal. [David] Mitchell is treating the italics almost like a color, similar to how one would use different pigments to design a flag since with flags, you're limited to only a few colors just like how there's only italicized and non-italicized options for text in this instance. The next use of italics (besides the italicized title of the TV show The Rockford Files ) is to emphasize the words forty  and fifty  when telling us ho

Esther and Holden both suck, but Stephen does not. I think it may be a matter of perspective. The main thing is just how judgemental that Esther and Holden are towards others. We're able to see from a first-person perspective how much they ridicule others in their own heads. They constantly make others the butt of the joke, and that attitude makes them frustrating to read. In both of their cases, I feel like that might be why they feel so threatened by society--they're always judging others, so they assume that others view them the same way. With Stephen, though, we see him through the eyes of Joyce. Stephen is the butt of the joke this time. He's the same dorky outcast as Esther and Holden, but because we view him from a different standpoint, we see him for who he truly is. For me, being able to view the character in this way makes them much more tolerable. It doesn't mean that Stephen has humility, but the unflattering way in which Joyce depicts him gives a sense of

In class, I was quite surprised when everyone concurred that Holden was writing about his own experiences over the few days after he left Pencey. The whole time, I was thinking that he was dictating it to someone else. I think that both approaches have their own meanings. If Holden himself were the author, the book really is a direct message from him to the reader. He's presenting his story so that it would resonate best with his ideal audience: other kids who might not know where they are in life. He also has more control over the product, and can more easily manipulate the story and its language to better convey the message that he's trying to send. If he dictated the story to some dude, which was I was thinking, the story suddenly becomes more authentic. Holden doesn't have the ability to doctor the story to his own ends. Another effect would be that Holden isn't talking to us, the reader--he's talking to someone else, who he might have reason to trust. This se

Bildungsroman , German for "education novel", is the term for a work of literature that deals with the psychological and moral growth during the formative years of a character's life. Examples include Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and The Catcher in the Rye  by J.D. Salinger. In other words, it's a "coming of age" novel. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a specific type of Bildungsroman, called a Kunstlerroman --the "artist's novel". The distinction is that while a Bildungsroman typically ends with the protagonist integrating themselves into society having found or created their true self, the Kunstlerroman's protagonist ends on a high note, where the protagonist realizes their vocation as an artist. I find this clear difference in final message to be interesting. In many classic bildungsromane, such as Emma  by Jane Austen, Tom Jones  by Henry Fielding and the aforementio

The first time that I encountered the phrase "Coming of Age" was in the description of the movie " Breaking Away ". My father was watching the movie while it was on TV, and I had nothing better to do, so I watched the last half with him. While we watched the scene where Dave races against the Italian cyclists, my dad explained to me how Dave had built up this image in his mind of these glorious racers and had completely immersed himself in Italian culture, wanting to become one of them. When the Italian racers see Dave catching up to them, they jam his tires and he crashes. He's shocked, and has to reconstruct his perspective on everything in his life in order to recover. This setup and subsequent "punchline" (for lack of a better word) found in Breaking Away has stuck with me since then. In my mind, the words "coming of age" are tightly bound to this concept of the debunking of childhood ideals. Dave's obsession with these seemingly su