Ending It With Different Styles

The end of The Great Gatsby by Cormac McCarthy:
In the future, we will try to improve, get better. But in the end, it won’t happen. It won’t happen.

The end of The Road by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
We thought that everything was older than humanity and perhaps, anonymity, believing it would untangle the mystery that recedes upon our future.

The Tragedy Of All Tragedies

This introduction to Hamlet by Kenneth Branagh captivated my attention, especially in the techniques he uses to portray the significance of the play itself, and also, convey the themes that it involves. Just as Orson Welles used the eyes and the hands, the blood, and the obscure scenario to evoke the thematic of Macbeth, the usage of mirrors in Branagh’s Hamlet is a perfect technique to give more momentum to the frequent soliloquies in the play. And if we are talking about Hamlet, which frequently is dubbed as the play of all plays, the tragedy of all tragedies, and the climax of Shakespearian tragedy, we as readers/audience should have very high expectations of the work itself. What’s my main expectation? To know why “There’s no good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet) or “To be or not to be” (Hamlet) are more transcending phrases in society than “Fair is foul and foul is fair” (Macbeth).

The Tale Of The Orphan Child

Some years ago, I lived one incident
That when remembered its only lament
For me, my family and memory,
That is just enough to tell my story

I lived with both my brothers and sister:
Andrés, José, and Sam, which I prefer
To call Ms. Eagle because she can see
And distinguish any inconsistency
Present in any place, at any time…
But now, I shall, continue with my rhyme.

One September night we went to the city
To watch The Road, that seemed a bit gritty.
My dad was still “at work”, well, that’s what he said,
So we went to the movie with my mom instead.

During the movie, Sam just kept staring
At a couple that was kissing and moving
In the front row, but only Sam noticed.
The movie was charming, I almost cried
When the man dies and leaves his son alone,
To find in this road, the good ones on his own.

The movie ended, and Sam kept looking
At this couple that kept kissing while going
Out of the theatres into the night’s cold.
She looked at the man, he was tall and old,
And someone she knew: it was her father
Getting into a Cab with his lover.

My mother also recognized my dad,
And she told us, instantly that we had
To follow dad, to see where that car
Was heading him and his lover so far
Outside the city, into the profound
Solitude of the suburbs empty ground.
In the highway, the Cab gathered speed
Up to scary limits, and nothing would impede
My mother from imitating the action
And speed up to the intersection
Of both lanes. Instantly in that moment
A car appeared, causing an accident.

I remember seeing a pair of weak
Lights coming towards us, hitting the peak
Of our car and my memory leaving
Until the moment I was standing
In the asphalt of the lonely highway
Looking at the still bodies, to my dismay.

Apparently, the crash had been between
The Cab, our car, and the other one I’d seen.
I looked around, spotting dad’s lover,
My mother, Andrés, José, my sister,
The Cab driver, and the man that was in
the other car. I grabbed my phone within,
and called the police, asking for vital aid,
“Hello? My name is Alex and I’m afraid
I need urgent help!” The voice on the line
Responded “Yes, sir, we will assign
A patrol to your place. What’s your location?”
Straight ahead, a sign read I-5 Intersection,
So I told the lady the place I stood
And thought about anything I could
Do to contain my mother’s grave bleeding,
And my brothers’ and sister’s constant weeping.

About two hours later, an ambulance
Arrived, and I focused at the quiet glance
Of the still bodies as the men carried
Them, one by one, as a few of them died
Little by little, in the arms of these
Doctors, hearing the voice of the night’s breeze.

I didn’t know how to feel, or what to feel
Waiting for the doctors to reveal
The fate of my mother, and wicked father.
My two brothers and sister, had rather
Survived the accident, and they sat
Besides me, in silence, waiting for that
Door to open with nothing but good news.
We waited, as I thought who to accuse
For this accident: my father, for depraved,
Or my mother for following the paved
Way behind the Cab he took, with his lover
To the outskirts of the city and uncover
The truth about him and the dissolution
Of our family, with no chance of resolution.

The doors of the room opened gradually
As my anxiety increased hastily.
A tall doctor appeared in my sight,
And he approached as I felt the night
Grow colder and colder as he grew closer.
I knew that his words would be either
Great or horrible. He asked for my name
And told me everything while my life became
The main factor of this story I’m telling,
While I sit here remembering and smelling
The loneliness of the road as I sat there,
Alone, accompanied by the dead air
Of the bodies of my mother and father,
Who died as their love died with each other.

And that’s my tale, which I bear in mind
So deep in myself as I try to confine
That loneliness I felt in the road,
Like the son, alone, with only one load
Left in the pistol, as his father died.
This movie marked the day that would divide
My life into two halves: the half with my
Family, and the half until I’d die.

As The Crow Flies Towards Death

No, I haven’ had a chance to see The Road movie. I called different theatres and in most of them, the premiere of it is this Friday, September 24. Anyways, as I finished the book, even though my first choice topic for blogging was a comparison with the movie, I’m going to give it a shot with another focus. What focus? It’s quite simple I guess, if you read the title of my entry: Death. Death pervades over everything in the book. For example, every character expects to die in any moment, especially the father, who apparently tends to have some type of paranoia towards death. He constantly checks if his son is breathing, and gives him the pistol every so often in order for him to kill himself with the pistol instead of suffering a painful death. Death is adamant at the end of the road. Even though people try to get prepared to die, the will die anyways. As Ely suggests, “People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them” (McCarthy 168). In the case of the father, he feared death and tried to keep his son in the dark about death, but inevitably, he dies at the end of the novel.

The road we follow throughout our lives is, in some extent, very similar to the crow’s flight. As the father explains to his son, the crow’s flight is in straight line. The road, in this case, is a straight line towards death. There is no way out of the road, no alternatives. Therefore, the father and his son are inevitably paving their way to an eventual death. They travel along the road hoping for a destiny that is utopic, because eventually, there will be an end to the road as there is an end to their lives. In the road, the father is “placing hopes where he’d no reason to” (McCarthy 213), looking for an exit where there are none. This effectuates his fear in death, and the reason he keeps his son ignorant about the matter. He tries to hide his constant cough from the boy, and in the end, the only thing he is left to do is die in the feet of his son. Also, he believes that “every day is a lie” but dying is the only fact that is not a lie (McCarthy 238), therefore, with death, comes the truth that he searched for throughout the book.

The Re-Birth Of A Book That Never Died

Maybe when we go back to the past, it has changed. Or maybe our future is meant to be going back to our past. I thought of writing this blog entry about the different points of view that Sonya Chung, but then I asked myself, why? Why would I want to re-write the same story, and fail, like Hunter S. Thompson tried with The Great Gatsby? Then, off course, I thought of the last line of Fitzgerald’s book, and how much it reflects what the Chung discusses in her blog entry: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (Fitzgerald). Now is the moment I put into testing all what I’ve learned about close reading in the last three years. First of all, we can extract from this sentence that even though we look for a future, pursuit our destiny, destiny itself is back in our past. In fact, Nick Carraway goes back to his past at the end of the story, he leaves the East and goes back to his homeland at Minnesota.

But then, what does this have to do with Chung’s blog entry? Well, she talks about how “the works stays the same; it’s we who change” (Chung), and as well, refers to how each reading of a book is different. In the case of Nick Carraway, his homeland stays the same before and after his departure to New York, and even though he has the chance of “beating on” and continuing his life in the East, he goes back to the past, just in the same manner we go back to reading a book even though there are many more in our libraries. Destiny brings us back to the same book, once, twice, and every so often and each time we will find it different, but the book is, and will always be the same old story. But we, we are not the same person, in fact, we are older.

Without counting the beautiful sentences, the relevance of the film adaptation, or the importance of Fitzgerald’s descriptions, one thing that Chung notes about the book is its ability to be eternal: to survive the decades without getting old, without becoming ashes in oblivion. To point out this argument, she describes the book as being “it’s a story about everything and everyone else. “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all,” muses the narrator Nick Carraway at the end” (Chung). Based on this, the metaphor of The Great Gatsby becomes bigger than just the descriptions, the symbols, or the thematic. Instead, we can interpret this book as reflecting the reader itself through Nick’s experience. We are the West, those unimportant figures in the reading. Here, Fitzgerald highlights the reader as being the main character of the story. Because in the end, the story is simple, but those details he puts, and that metaphor that he creates with the book itself, is what makes the book immortal. By reading the book, maybe a couple of times more, we will see ourselves reflected on its pages.

Okay

The child and his father. Or the father and his son? I take a look at many of the books I’ve read in the last couple of years, and find a particular aspect in all of these: every single one develops a relationship between two central characters. The relationship can be dialectic, antagonistic, foil, nemesis, alter ego, etc. I can remember many names, many characters, and many different stories: La Maga and Oliveira, Don Quixote and Sancho, Kurt Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, Charles and Emma Bovary, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and finally, the father and his child. But then, which of the types I mentioned does this relationship fit in?

We have the child, being naïve, innocent, and feeling emptiness in his heart due to the absence of his mother. And we have the man, having a strong belief in God, faithful, valiant, and owner of an unnamable love for his son to the extent that he becomes paranoid. If so then what? As the only two central figures, the father and son become dialectic, just as La Maga and Oliveira, but in this case, real love is going on: “What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die, too. SO you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay” (McCarthy, 11). Even though the topic of death is recurrent in this relationship, we are never quite sure of who is the one who fears death. First of all, we have the child wanting to die in order to be with his mother, but at the same time, is afraid of encountering death in a harsh manner. On the other hand, the father isn’t afraid of death, he will even die in order to protect his son and keeps the last round of bullets in his pistol to avoid his child of dying in a unforgiving manner. But about death I might talk in a future entry, due to the fact is a broader topic…

For now I concentrate with the child and his father, or the father and his son? It sounds as if both are equally important, and the focus of the reader remains equal throughout the book. We can argue that Sancho, eventually, is as important as Don Quixote in Cervantes’ novel, then, is the child the foil of his father? Honestly, this little naïve guy reminds me of Sancho himself, as he escorts his father through the perils of the road, even though he only preoccupies his father rather than protecting him. And even though he doubts of his destiny, he never doubts of his father: “And we’re carrying the fire. And we’re carrying the fire. Yes. Okay” (McCarthy, 129). This line repeats throughout their relationship, serving like the inspiration motto, hope, the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, in this case, the road. And with the recurrence of the child’s “Okay” we might extract his faith towards his dad, and his desire not to take his contrary. Complete allegiance. Then, is it the child and his father, or the father and his son? I don’t know yet. Okay. Okay.

Ashes Of Memories

Ashes. They are everywhere. As long as we walk we will see ashes containing the presence of my son and me. These ashes walk with me, guide me through the road, and make me remember. Remember…

When sitting in front of a chimney I see lumber, pieces of wood exerting heat, due to the fire that, apparently, is crumpling them. Minutes later, the lumber I looked at became ashes, it was only a memory. As I turn the pages of this book, the page before, becomes ashes, a memory. Therefore, I would love to share this quote before it becomes… What? Ashes: “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void” (McCarthy, 11). These ashes walk with them through the road, just as the ashes read with me, flying free from the chimney and becoming memories as they try to reach me. Anyways, besides being personified, the ashes are there always, besides them and besides me throughout the book. Well, in my case, due to the fact I read this first fraction of the book in front of a chimney…

Ashes, like living while being dead. They preserve everything. Reminds me of Pompeii, this historic city of the Roman Civilization that collapsed under the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, and nowadays, we can look at it and see the intact streets, the stores, houses, the bodies… These ash-covered city, two thousand years later, stands still, and we can feel like walking back all those years and being present at the moment everything happened…

Then, the ashes leave us a clear hint of the destiny of the earth, “or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin” (McCarthy 77). These ashes not only maintain a body, but also a memory. Hope, as described through the words of “the last music”, is buried within the ashes that cover the pages of this book. Or memories. Ashes bring back forgotten thoughts, as it happens to the man with his constant flashbacks. But in the end, the last music will revive from ashes. Just as a beautiful phoenix burns in flames and breathes life out of the ashes.

Feeling Melancholic

As soon as we read the title of the poem, “The Raven”, we can automatically deduce that the central figure of the poem is a raven. While reading it, various excerpts and verses of the poem not only establish the raven as a symbol of the poem itself, but also give it metaphorical value. With the verse, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’” (The Raven, 48), it is explicit how Poe gives the Raven characteristics of a human being, hence, employing personification. By giving it a human characteristic of speech, the significance of the Raven can further be interpreted as being a sort of omniscient voice, or the voice of conscience.

Since throughout the poem the narrator is apparently becoming mad while mourning the death of his love Lenore, the Raven serves as that metaphysical voice that he hears. Not only his repeating onomatopoeia of “nevermore” takes a significant role, but also the Raven’s eyes, “And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming”, making them a metaphor by comparing them with the demon’s eyes. And through this, it makes the Raven be the source of all the suffering and grief that the narrator is experiencing. But also, with all the repetition of rhyme, sound consonance, and alliteration, Poe is able to reproduce linguistically and visually the melancholy and depression that every verse transmits.

Duplicitous Church

SW 19
London, England
September 5, 1395

Dear Timothy,

Sorry for just contacting you until today, I’ve been spending my whole vacations reading this book by Geoffrey Chaucer entitled, The Canterbury Tales. I send it to you so you can notice many arguments that can, in fact, contradict all your philosophy and ideology about the Church. Throughout the various tales you can notice one same recurring aspect: the Church. He isn’t quite exactly idolizing the Church, instead, he is criticizing it through these very satiric pieces of fiction.

Specifically, the tale that most captivated my attention about the hypocrisy of the Church that Chaucer portrays was The Pardoner’s Tale. First hand, the teller of the tale, the Pardoner, is the complete opposite of what you can expect from a person like him. For example, he starts his tale saying, “Now, for the love of Christ, that for us dyed, / Lete youre othes, bothe grete and smale” (Chaucer, 658-59). What a hypocritical act don’t you think? But such act is consistent with the type of character that Chaucer has presented to us as the Pardoner. But, this satiric aspect of Chaucer’s parody towards the Church is consistent throughout the Tales. He portrays the religious figures in a deviate manner, where their personalities correspond to that of common medieval stereotypes. As a result, he reduces the Church’s importance, and instead, satirizes its significance to the height it serves as cynical comedy for the reader.

But, Tim, even if you don’t agree with Chaucer’s point of view and that of his Tales, please read it as soon as you get it so you realize how the Church is a puzzle of contradictions. It’s quite interesting to see both sides of the picture, Tim, and with the Pardoner we not only learn that “Radix malorum est Cupiditas” (334), but also that he himself is representing the Church, and hence, is sinning since the very beginning of his story by swearing and violating the Second Commandment. But I will leave it for you to interpret.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Andrew

The Gospel According To The Wyf Of Bath

Let me start. Let see, what can I say about this tale? Through the reading of the Tale of The Wyf of Bath, and taking into account it comes after The Miller’s Tale and The Knight’s Tale, I find it important the way Chaucer arranges this stories in order to contrast their different themes and points of view. In a way, these are different ways of telling the same story, not literally, off course. Plainly, the stories of each of the tales are quite different, but if you take their meanings into consideration, they aren’t quite different. All of these are told in order to transcend the idea of love in different perspectives. As I have discussed in earlier entries about the presence of love in The Miller’s Tale and The Knight’s Tale, here, the Wyf of Bath takes a completely different perspective: being love a tool to achieve what they most want in the world.

Good point, but, I thought of The Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: each of them narrating a similar thematic through different perspectives, but all leading to the same message. Then, what is Wyf’s perspective? “Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee / As wel over hir housbond as hir love, / And for to been in maistrie hym above” (Chaucer, 1038, 1040). In my personal opinion, considering the fact that women had the complete control of men in a society of circa 1300 is quite idealistic, but still, leaving clear her message. Also, this idealism transmitted by the Wyf with statements like such mentioned above, might be further interpreted as skeptical towards a patriarchal society. Through this skepticism, the Wyf portrays men as completely untrustworthy and superficial, by demonstrating the knight’s shallow transformation through the tale compared to the old woman’s notorious change.

Still, why does this old woman appear?

Just to change everything and give it a happy ending?

It sounds to me as deus ex machina.

Yeah, sort of, but she sounds to be representing the Wyf herself. Even though she is old and a bit aged, she is able to display all her inner beauty and heartiness when the right man (the knight) appeared in her life: “But, for ye speken of swich gentillesse / As I descended out of old richesse, / That therefore sholden ye be genti men, / Swich arrogance is nat worth an hen” (Chaucer, 1109-12)…

But then the knight also appears to give happiness to the old woman.

Yes, but he is also happy, he provides her what a woman most wants in the world, and as a reward he receives all her inner beauty. Just as it happened to the Wyf of Bath, as she found the real feeling of love in her fifth husband.

As I told you in the beginning, she, the Wyf of Bath, considers love a tool, a way to reach total happiness and those things women most want in the world. It’s a different version of love. Not the noble and loyal one as portrayed by the Knight, or the one The Miller depicts, full of adultery, and mockery.

Yes, this sounds like The Gospel according to The Wyf of Bath.

Is This Truth The Real Truth?

I seriously doubt about the sincerity and authenticity of this Wyfe of Bath’s stories and memories about her past husbands. As she tells the pilgrims, and us, every once in a while after talking about something she did, or said, she would end the sentence uttering, “and all was fals” (Chaucer, 382). How credible can a source of information, in this case our dear story teller, the Wyfe of Bath, if every so often she regrets of what she says and makes a correction? To me, not quite reliable. But anyways, since she is the narrator, she can decide the truth. The narrator is the manipulator of this truth we, as readers, or the pilgrims, as listeners, are spoken of. The Knight, and the Miller are also narrating their tales, and hence the truth of them, their verisimilitude is abstract since everything that happens is subject to their manipulation of the truth.

Is this truth the real truth? We don’t know, this reality of which we are reading changes in every tale. First we have loyalty, heroic men, manipulating deities. Then, we have adultery, farts, and weak characters. Now what? What will be the truth according to the Wyfe of Bath? I really hope it’s a bit more reliable and less contradictory than the stories about her husband’s. Also, this bias of the Wyfe’s story toward feminism is relevant to her point about Church’s writings, which portray women as evil due to the fact they were written by men: “If women hadde writen stories, / As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, / They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse” (Chaucer, 693-95). Hence, every single story, tale, legend, or allegory told in the world throughout history, every single one is subject to the truth its narrator wants us to comprehend. Then, as you read this blog of mine, you might ask yourself the same question, is this truth the real truth?