So You Want to be an Arsonist: William Faulkner on How Not to Get Caught "Barn Burning"

In a nutshell, I was pretty taken aback by Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning."  The title was already making me squirm a little and I didn't know if the story would be just as cryptic as As I Lay Dying was.  Thankfully it wasn't too convoluted.  However, it was one of the saddest stories I had read in a long time.  Imagine being the son of a man who has been charged with arson multiple times.  The ethical dilemma is just screaming out to the reader, and this is what Faulkner was trying to show through the protagonist Colonel Sartoris Snopes.  Snopes and his family live in Faulkner's made-up Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi (no surprise) just like the Bundrens from As I Lay Dying (it will all make sense once you start reading the novel).  This makes no difference, but it begs the question of whether Faulkner's some of the stories take place simultaneously in Yoknapatawpha County or are they all set in different time periods.  No matter, the Snopes' are your average poor rural family with one little glitch:  a disfigured father named Abner Snopes.  A red flag should be going off immediately when one finds out a character is deformed (think Flannery O'Connor).  Abner Snopes's issue is a limp in his leg from being shot in the Civil War.  Besides that, he is described as stiff-bodied and even worse he speaks in a harsh emotionless voice.  I really want to meet this guy (sarcasm ensues).  Thus far there is no evidence that he is very likable, so he is a good candidate to be a criminal.  For Sartoris Snopes, it means having to submit without fail to an angry father who loves to show his superiority as patriarch.  The situation is almost as bad for Abner Snopes's wife (how could she have married  this guy).  She is scared into submission by her husband's violent nature.

With so many problems, Abner Snopes looks like he has a lot to answer to.  He seems to lack a conscience and a sense of decency.  Whatever happens, he will eventually have to confess any wrongdoings he may have done to either his family or the judge, who will be so happy to see him (not really).  All of this and more made me sad and also glad to have read William Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning."  I would highly recommend it because if one wishes to understand an author, it never hurts to read more than one of his or her works.  Another one of Faulkner's short stories that is just as gut-wrenching is "A Rose for Emily."                                                  

Hemingway Vs. Faulkner: The Most Epic Battle of the Lost Generation

Finally, the moment I have been waiting for this entire year!  I can now delve into the quandary that is who won:  Hemingway or Faulkner?  A.P. Hamlit reads As I lay Dying, while Creative and Critical Writing classes study Hemingway.  Mr. Frankum's classes have had The Sun Also Rises as summer reading and I have heard that Mr. Fiorelli had his students read "Hills Like White Elephants" at some point in the year.  In my post of Orwell Vs. Huxley, I discussed common concepts in their masterpieces 1984 and Brave New World respectively and voiced my opinion of who won on each battleground.  Here I will strictly discuss the two authors' differing styles and the cultural aspects of their works.  About half of A.P. Hamlit should have opinions on the dispute since those taking both senior English courses will have been exposed to both authors.  For the rest, I would recommend reading Hemingway after finishing As I Lay Dying or while reading it.

Let's start with Faulkner because A.P. Hamlit will study him (no offense to Hemingway).  One should be surprised that he was able to write short stories (it will all make sense after reading or attempting to read As I lay Dying).  His sentences vary in structure, but tend to be longer and much more substantive.  I believe that since he was trying to paint vivid mental pictures in the minds of his readers while also conveying deep concepts in an understandable manner, his sentences turned out to be many individual parts connected with conjunctions.  Another intriguing aspect of the depth of Faulkner's sentences is that one can understand how introspective certain characters are.  As I Lay Dying is a patchwork of thoughts by the characters involved in the events the story discusses.  The obvious reason for this setup is to show differing viewpoints for major plot points.  However, the difference in how characters express themselves in dialogue and in thoughts shows readers that Faulkner is not writing a tale about a bunch of uneducated Southern farmers.  They do not seem intelligent only because their manner of speaking is so far from the rules of the English language.  Their narrations reveal characters that are at different levels of "supposing."  The stream of consciousness setup facilitates a reader response about the mental state of each major character.  It also for me aided in eliciting sympathy for a few characters.  Long story short, Faulkner was a master of portraying the complexity of the mind and the thoughts it concocts in a manner readers can grasp (or hopefully grasp more often than not).

Now for the great Ernest Hemingway.  His style is almost a paradox in that he made his prose as minimalist as possible, but his sentences turned out to be long and you guessed it extended using conjunctions, namely "and".  In his pursuit of simplicity in language, he broke a few rules of grammar in his narrations.  This mostly consisted of leaving out certain words, which sometimes leads to sentences sounding awkward when read aloud.  No matter what issues may have arisen from boiling down his writing to the bare minimum, Hemingway clearly achieved a more conversational and informal tone, which was needed due to the material he wrote about.  Being from the Lost Generation, he lived in an era that was trying to make sense out of the senseless Great War.  Consequently, his stories are about the daily lives of people who were changed drastically by the war.  The Sun Also Rises is essentially the antics of a group of expatriates, those that renounce their country's citizenship.  Hemingway in this novel meant to capture the manner in which people of that time period "drained their sorrows" in a manner of speaking.  This implies excessive drinking and excessive partying.  The female lead character Lady Brett Ashley is depicted as a tomboyish character in order to fulfill this requirement (and because Hemingway did not know how to correctly portray women).  In a Hemingway story, the closest thing to a central meaning is the realization of how the post-Great War era was marked by an aspect of debauchery.  Unlike Faulkner, Hemingway seemed as if he was writing for himself in a sense.  This is motivated by how close his stories are to things he himself experienced.  All in all, works by Ernest Hemingway are considered classics because of how down to earth and relatively informal they are.  It didn't hurt that it takes literary genius to be a minimalist writer.  In my opinion, Hemingway is a guy's author, but that is only because he portrays women characters as having traditionally masculine qualities.

Who Won?  It's all a matter of opinion like anything else.  Faulkner and Hemingway were both great authors and deserve to be studied in English courses.

                                                                 

Mitch Albom Revisited: For One More Day

I'm sorry I didn't post this earlier.  I finished up with For One More Day a month or two ago, but it was so good that I remember finishing it like it was yesterday.  For those of you in Ingram's engaging death and dying class, this should be read after Tuesdays With Morrie.  Both are amazing reads and contain life-changing morals relating to death and dying (and life and living according to Mr. Ingram!).  That's not to say that both works are at the low level of fable.  For One More Day is a work of fiction, but in my opinion certain aspects of the story could be true of many professional athletes.  

Similar to Tuesdays With Morrie in that it is about one major character, the novel is about a professional baseball player who has a very unique form of near-death experience in which he spends time with his recently dead mother who acts as if she never died.  The washed up MLB player gets much-needed guidance from his mother as he searches for a purpose to live after losing everything dear to him.  For inquisitive Ingram students, the clinical death occurred after Charles "Chick" Benetto, the protagonist, threw himself from the top of a water tower in an attempt to commit suicide.  

I will say no more on plot!

It is a very quick read and contains just as important a central meaning as the longest masterwork.  Clearly quality over quantity, which for contemporary authors is very important because many people now do not seem to have as much time on their hands to read a work as long as Crime and Punishment or The Count of Monte Cristo or It.  All of Mitch Albom's works have been short, but sweet.  I am about to start reading another of his works, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  I saw the movie based off of it with veteran actor Jon Voight (he was in National Treasure) as the lead character a few years ago and loved it.  It's a shame the movie was only made for TV.  I would recommend reading all of Albom's books instead of just reading Tuesdays With Morrie.  If one reads his three major works and gets his fourth book which just came out, that's four easy blog posts.               

Hamlet and The Lion King. Parallels?

Hi everyone!  These posts are way overdue, but I will start with the hot topic in A.P. Hamlit:  Hamlet.  When I was finished reading the play and when my class was discussing it I could not get the musical numbers from The Lion King out of my head.  It's sad to think that in grade school when I first encountered Hamlet i did not immediately pick up on how similar the Disney film and Shakespeare tragedy are.  Here is a list of the parallel characters with the Shakespearean characters matched up to their Disney counterparts.

Prince Hamlet= Simba

Claudius= Scar

King Hamlet = Mufasa (say his name several times)

The Ghost= Rafiki

Queen Gertrude= Sarabi (Simba's mother)

Ophelia= Nala

Horatio= Timon and Pumbaa

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern= the hyenas Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed (gotta love Ed!)

Polonius= Zazu

Before the comments go out about some of these parallels being wrong, I am leaving out the differences in plot.  For example, Simba does not die, but Disney does not usually kill off the good guys.  They leave it to Pixar (Up comes to mind).  Also, even though Zazu could not father a lion, I saw him as an adviser just like Polonius was.

Another point to note is that I had Hamlet's father and the Ghost be different characters because Hamlet doubts whether he actually encountered his father or the devil, and Rafiki was the one who allowed the adult Simba to hear Mufasa's message telling him to defeat Scar.

You should notice that I did not list a parallel for Laertes.  Please post your thoughts!

         

Book Recommendation: In Cold Blood

Those of you who read the Creative and Critical Writing summer reading books should agree that Truman Capote's masterpiece In Cold Blood was definitely worth reading.  Although it is a work of non-fiction, when I read it I almost forgot that the events described in it had actually happened.  It almost became its own story.

There were countless reasons why I enjoyed In Cold Blood, but the aspect of the book that I enjoyed the most was the plot development.  The changes in point of view and the flashbacks into the characters' pasts makes the plot non-linear, which helps any story resemble real life more than with a linear construction.  Capote was almost forced to write his book this way since it was a work of non-fiction, meaning that it was based on a true story.  As I was reading, I nearly forgot that there actually was a Clutter family in the Midwest that were the victims of a heinous crime.

An important element of the story that played a significant role in the story's plot development was point of view.  Capote marks new "chapters" by shifting the story's focus from one group of characters to another.  In this way, one event can be shown from many different angles, giving it a three-dimensional aspect.  I felt like I could watch the story unfold from a birds-eye view.

The most obvious device that Capote used to masterfully craft the plot of the story was to me irony, specifically of the situational and dramatic kind.  The dramatic irony is clearly more important in that since the story was based on true events, one can conclude that those who committed the crime against the Clutter family were caught.  This implies that there would not be many plot twists, but there are some.  I do not want to spoil the ending.  Dramatic irony shows up in the form of complacency, meaning that certain characters believe something so whole-heartedly that they do not realize that it is false information.  Shakespeare's plays are successes partly due to this type of irony.

I believe that In Cold Blood is a must-read.  It may seem boring in the beginning, but it gets really good after all of the set-up is finished.  In other words, it may be slow-moving in certain parts, but that does not take away from its greatness.                    

Does Adolf Verloc Deserve Our Pity?

After finishing Joseph Conrad's masterwork The Secret Agent, I was blown away by the ending and was left with many questions.  One of them was whether Verloc deserved the reader's sympathy or not.  I can see both sides of this question and am unsure which opinion to take.

On the one hand, Verloc did not mean for his brother-in-law to die during the Greenwich job and one could clearly see that he wished he had never accepted the task.  He seemed to be a victim of circumstances that he could not control.  For example, Verloc could not force Stevie to simply plant the bomb and get out of the observatory because Stevie was mentally disabled.  This is not to say that Stevie's death was his own fault.  It could have been an accident.  The text did say that Stevie tripped and the bomb detonated.  After the bombing, the Professor, the one who supplied the explosives, told the Chief Inspector that there was plenty of time on the bomb before it would blow up.  The fact that Stevie could not be easily told what to do by Verloc could have been the reason the job failed.  With this in mind, one may conclude that Verloc was innocent and should not have been knifed by his wife.

On the other hand, it is possible that Verloc should not be pitied by the reader.  While he was clearly a victim of circumstances in terms of the Greenwich accident, he has been labeled a lazy bum and a liar.  This should be self-evident since he is a secret agent in the employ of the embassy.  Interestingly enough, his employer, Mr. Vladimir, told him that he was not doing enough to keep his job.  With this kind of a character trait, one could reason that Verloc lacks the vigor and energy to be a noble person.  Thus he is not a hero and should not be admired by the reader.  As for being deceptive, that is a significant part of Verloc's job.  All those in the field of espionage must be good liars.  Therefore, from a hindsight perspective it is not surprising that Winnie Verloc knows nothing of her husband's true occupation and the whereabouts of her brother on the day of the Greenwich bombing.  He lied to her face by saying that he took Stevie to live out in the country in the care of Michaelis, a friends of the Verlocs.  One can go as far as saying that justice was done to Verloc when he payed for his ways with his life.

I am not sure whether to pity Adolf Verloc or to dislike him.  He is not a tragic hero, but he did endure a reversal of fortune which ended with his death and his killer's death.  If anyone wishes to take sides, comment on this post with your answer and why.                        

Thoughts on Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie

I have been reading Tuesdays With Morrie for a few weeks now and I wish it could be on the A.P. exam.  Those people taking Death and Dying have to read it before mid-terms and even though I am not finished the book I know why Mr. Ingram chose it.  It is all about death and dying.

The book is a first-person recounting of Albom's time spent with Morrie Schwartz, his sociology professor, who in his twilight years contracted Lou Gehrig's disease and was forced to count the days he had left to live.  Albom, when he heard about what became of Morrie, had a job as a sports writer and a life of his own.  After graduating college he promised Morrie that they would stay in touch.  It is not surprising that this didn't happen because Albom as a young man, according to the text, seemed ready to go out on his own and seek his fortune.  He forgot about Morrie and it was only by chance that he found out that he was dying.  Right now, I am now in the part of the book where the two have "classes" on Tuesdays and discuss different aspects of life and death.  Don't worry I did not spoil the ending.  I don't even know how it ends!

One of the literary elements of the novel that I am enjoying the most is the flashback.  Albom uses it very well in that one knows when the narrator is recalling memories of his college courses with Morrie or when in the story it is the present time.  Because of this, the plot is made non-linear, forcing the reader to piece together the narrator's college days and to trace the connections between a particular memory and what was discussed in one of the Tuesday sessions at Morrie's house.  One of the best parts of a non-linear plot structure is that it more accurately portrays real life than a nice elegant chain of events.  It is not surprising that Albom would decide to write his work in this way because he can be considered part of the post-modernist era, which is known for books made up of disjointed events that may not be in chronological order.

Even though changing the way the plot is expressed makes the book different, the most mind-blowing aspect for me so far is, strangely enough, its philosophical nature.  It's as if Albom is going to examine death and dying from every possible angle.  I have already seen many things that Mr. Ingram has talked about in class.  For example, when Albom saw Morrie on the news and he was talking about the slow and painful death he will have, the narrator commented on how the rest of the world did not seem to take notice of Morrie's plight.  There were plenty of people who took the time out of their own lives to see him, but overall it was as if no one cared.  I have also noticed aspects of existentialism in the story.  The way Morrie spent his last days alive was the "healthy" response to the notion that everyone will die eventually.  However, while the rest of us know nothing about how we will die, Morrie knows approximately how long he has and in what manner he will perish.  This gives him a huge advantage because although he will not accomplish everything in life he would want to, his carpe diem nature will drive him to make the most out of each minute given to him.  Morrie does exactly that, through not isolating himself from the world and through making a difference in others' lives by simply enduring.  In this way, he can be seen as a role model in that instead of giving up and asking a doctor to euthanize him, he decides to withstand the pain of having every muscle in his body slowly weaken to the point where it cannot be used again.

I am definitely enjoying Tuesdays With Morrie not just because of what it has to say about death and dying, but also because it contains several lessons for life.  All I hope is that I can write intelligently about this book come January when I take the final exam in my death and dying course.

As a side note, I will be reading other books by Mitch Albom and I hope to post my thoughts on them in the near future.