Carpe Diem

Carpe Diem poets are well known for their poems about sex, love, and living while young. One of the most famous is "To His Coy Mistress" by Marvell. This poem out of all the ones read in class, I feel is the most persuasive. Not to say any of them are very persuasive (ahem! The Flea, I'm looking at you!) but it is the one that starts off with the standard male way to go about getting a girl to sleep with them. Flirting, and going on about their beauty and how lovely they are and how wonderful, then going on to say it won't last so the time is now. It seems over the thousands of years, nothing has changed.

A good person, let alone a good man, is hard to find

O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" has no good characters. They are all written as very flat, and pretty single dimensional which is rather annoying. This made it really unrealistic to me and I don't feel bad when the ending comes and they meet an unhappy end. None of them seem to be real, even the mother doesn't try to save her children. This was very disappointing and to me, I can't see why it is considered a higher piece of fiction called literature but perhaps that is one of the best things about literature. People will pull different things from each of the separate texts, however some will be more understandable for some and for others it will be meaningless.

A&P

This short story made me rather annoyed for multiple reasons but the most prominent in the text was the main character's pretense of being a hero. Sure these girls didn't deserve to be publicly humiliated however if he was going to do something he should have stood up for them in front of his boss instead of just quitting. Moreover if he were to stand up for them it should have been because he felt there was an injustice done to them, not just because he wanted to be their hero. Going a step farther, he also shouldn't have thought of them as "his" girls; this makes them objects that are suddenly HIS possessions just because he saw them and was attracted to them. This story I hated purely because even though what he did, and his intention too, may have been admirable, what actually drove him to act and his own thoughts were reprehensible.

Life and Loaded Guns

I've spent a long time trying to deny my love for Emily Dickinson's writing. If I read it with no knowledge of the author, I often would proclaim how much I loved it until I found out it was by her. I'm not sure where this prejudice came from but now I fully admit it, I love her poems. As much as it tastes like acid on my tongue to do so.
In class we read multiple works by her, most recently My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun. Reading her is interesting because almost always the first time I go through it because by the time I get to the last lines, I have no idea what I just read. However, rereading is full of answers to everything I first brushed off as nonsense. Within every one of her poems, there are a few lines I gravitate towards first that help me go back and discover more about her meaning behind them. This poem's lines were "To foe of His - I'm deadly foe - / None stir the second time -" and "For I have but the power to kill,/ Without - the power to die -". These lines are both giving her lots of power, and a theme I feel is expressed throughout the entirety of the poem, however that was a topic of dispute in class.

Wallpaper full of Possiblity

Ever since I'd heard of The Yellow Wallpaper I'd been dying to read it. My sister first mentioned it to me when I paced around the house over and over again from anxiety, she said it reminded her of the narrator, peeking my curiosity. Reading it for the first time, the main character writes so earnestly it is easy to believe everything she says until the end of the short story when everything unravels. It is written with odd images giving it the same feel as a novel written with magical realism (one of my personal favorite things). But for me, the best part was going over it and rereading it, it's possible to  imagine different twists to the story because of all the interesting phrases, symbolism, and word choices. Suddenly, it's easy to not trust the narrator's story and see different possibilities of what her actual situation is. Is she in an asylum? Had she been admitted before? Is her madness because of her lack of stimulation? Is she even alive in the beginning or a ghost who simply didn't know? So many possibilities makes it an exciting read every time.

The Annoyance of a Scrivener

Melville. I think I may cringe every time I hear his name for a while now. Reading "Bartleby, The Scrivener" was brutal for me especially since I had the distinct feeling that Melville tried to get the reader to care for Bartleby and wonder at this bizarre and unreasonable character. It felt as though because the lawyer tolerated Bartleby's behavior and mannerisms that they should be less annoying and the reader should feel the same tolerance and concern as the lawyer felt. However if this was in any part something Melville meant to incorporate, he failed. Unfortunately, his descriptions would fluctuate between being entertaining and quirky to long, repetitive, and utterly unnecessary, so I found myself in the odd position of loving Ginger Nut the most as he seemed the most interesting one of the bunch and the most entertaining, despite having the smallest role.

Rehashing Hemingway

After reading Hemingway's "The Old Man and The Sea", I decided I didn't like his style of writing. However, I find myself in the odd position of having to examine that claim now that I've read "Hills Like White Elephants". His short story is so different from what I remember. Of course this may be because I didn't pick it up on my own free will, but rather from being forced by school curriculum. Either way, there are some differences that I know brought me closer to this short story in comparison to his novel. Despite the reader being thrown into the middle of this private conversation, having no knowledge of the characters nor their history, it was very easy to read and begin to feel for them. The way they argue, yet try to come to a decision but know that things will ultimately not work out, at least not the way it did before, show they do genuinely seem to care but their situation is taking a toll on their relationship. It's written as though the reader were there overhearing a conversation, which is something I've rarely come upon and after this experience, I think I quite like it.