"The School" Blog

It was very difficult for me to try and decipher what the underlying meaning of this short story was. The only thought that came to mind the first time I read the story through was, "Wow, that was depressing." The story begins with the class of children planting numerous orange trees that eventually end up dying. Soon the reader comes to find that this is only one of many occurrences in which something that involves this particular class dies. I like how the the narrator is speaking as if he is casually telling a story to friend or two. "Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that...that was part of their education..." The language is easy to understand and straight forward. As the story progresses, the subjects that die become more and more shocking. It begins with orange trees, snakes, herb gardens, tropical fish, and a salamander, but it soon advances to a puppy, parents and grandparents of the children in the class, and even two classmates. At the end of the story, the children address the teacher and ask him where all of these things that died went? "They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar..." He answers them honestly saying he  doesn't know. The children then go deeper and begin to ponder whether death is the meaning of life. At this point I began to question the age of these children. From the beginning I assumed that they were rather young, but at the end of the story they seem to be so bright and wise. For example in this line, "Then they said, but isn't death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of--" I definitely was not speaking like this when I was a child. Then the class begins to ask the teacher about sex. I am not really clear at all on what the meaning of this portion of the story is. Perhaps a loss of innocence? Finally at the very end of the story a new gerbil is brought into the classroom and "The children cheer wildly." Does this represent hope perhaps? Even though the children have had rotten luck in the past, they are optimistic that the new gerbil will be a turning point and break the curse. Maybe he will actually survive. This is how I wish to interpret the ending. However, it could just be an endless cycle, and the gerbil may soon bite the dust, just like those who came before him.

VOCABULARY:
Gristede's: A chain of small supermarkets

"The Flowers" and "Girl" Blog

The short story "Flowers" by Alice Walker seemed at first glance to be a tale of the joyous wanderings of a young girl named Myop. I was stunned when it took such a devastating turn, and Myop discovered a decaying body in the woods. I have actually read Alice Walker before in one of my high school English courses and recall that she is an African American writer. It seems that Myop belongs to a family of sharecroppers, "Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family's sharecropper cabin." Because Alice Walker often writes of African Americans, I assumed that Myop was an African American whose family is bound to sharecropping as a means to support themselves. The majority of the poem speaks of Myop happily talking a walk and admiring the beauty of her surroundings. On a whim she decides to take a new path instead of keeping to the path she normally takes. When she finally decides to turn back, she immediately senses a change in her surroundings. "But the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep." It is at this point in the poem that I noticed a drastic shift in tone. The carefree tone quickly changed to a gloomy one. Myop then discovers the body of a man. The describe the man wearing overalls which automatically made me assume the man was a worker, possibly a sharecropper. It makes me wonder if this could have been a racial crime. They describe the remains of a noose which makes me believe he was hung, or hung himself. The poem ends with the line, "And the summer was over." Perhaps Walker was referring to the not only the end of a season, but the end of Myop's childhood and the loss of her innocence.

VOCABULARY:
Myop: Possibly short for myopathy meaning "nearsightedness

"Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid is composed of a mother's harsh instructions to her daughter regarding cooking, cleaning, love, and how to behave in certain social situations. Because the name of the story is "Girl" and not woman, I assume that the mother is talking to an adolescent. "Girl" is also a rather vague and impersonal description, as opposed to something like daughter. The mother is very stern and detailed in her instructions to the daughter. She obviously feels as if she cannot handle much on her own or without any guidance. The mother is also very judgmental of her daughter, often referring to her as a slut. "...on Sundays try to act like the lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming." I also noticed that many of the mothers instructions revolve around the men in the society. The poem must take place in a time when gender roles were predominate in society. "...this is how you behave in the presence of a man..." Obviously women were portrayed as subordinate to men. Almost the entire poem consists of these directions and accusations the mother imposes on the daughter.

VOCABULARY:
barehead: having your head uncovered
fritter: a piece of fruit

"Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" and "Daddy" Blog

One of the poems we have been assigned to read in class is "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver. From what I can tell, the speaker in this poem is looking at a photograph of her father on fishing trip from when he was a young man, 22 years old to be precise. I immediately assumed that the speaker was a female, but I think that was simply because I was trying to identify with the speaker. In reality, it probably makes more sense that the speaker is male because he is talking about fishing with his father. The son begins the poem describing the surroundings in the picture, and it is in this first stanza that I concluded the father was on a fishing trip. The speaker says, "...he holds in one hang a string of spiny yellow perch." In the second stanza the speaker talks about how his father has always wanted to be something he isn't, "He would pose bluff and hearty for his posterity, wear his old hat cocked over his ear. All his life my father wanted to be bold." In this last statement I sensed some resentment from the speaker. It seems as though he was saying that instead of yearning to be a good father to his son, he instead yearned to be revered by his comrades. I could not recall the exact definition of posterity, so I looked it up at dictionary.com and discovered that it meant future generations of. This was consistent with how the second stanza was describing the father's facade. It is in the final statement that the son makes his resentment towards his father especially clear. He says, "Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, and don't even know the places to fish." This makes it apparent to the reader that the speaker's father was never there for him as child or even an adult. He holds a grudge against his father for not being there for him like a father should be, for not taking him on fishing trips or spending quality time with him. This is what I gathered from the poem, and I look forward to seeing what my classmates thought in class tomorrow.


The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath was a little more difficult for me to understand than Raymond Carver's poem "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year." From what I gathered, the poem is about a woman whose Nazi father died when she was very young, but the memories of him still haunt her. She ends up searching for a husband who resembles her father, and the speaker describes her husband as a vampire who "drank her blood" for seven years. The speaker also talks about attempting to kill herself while trying to rid herself of these men in her life. I get the impression that by the end of the poem the speaker finally shuts them both out of her life, "staking them in the heart." At the beginning of the poem the speaker compares her father to black shoe that she has had to live in. Not only does this evoke images of being trapped, but the color black also brings about negative connotations from the very beginning of the poem. "...black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo." These lines in the first stanza describe the speakers fear of her father really well. She describes her father with terms like God, statue, and big which let us know how helpless she felt around him. Because her father is said to be a Nazi, she assumes the part of the Jew or the victim. "An engine, an engine chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may as well be a Jew." To compare her feelings toward her father to going to a concentration camp is a pretty big deal. It illustrates again how deathly afraid of him she was. Stanza 8 is really confusing to me. I think the speaker is describing some of the landscape of Germany. She also speaks of her "gypsy ancestress." I suppose this means that at least one of her ancestors was a gypsy, but I am not sure of how this is relevant. I vaguely remember learning about the Nazis exterminating gypsies, but I am not 100 percent sure. In the next stanza the speaker admits how she has always been scared of her father with his "neat mustache" and "Aryan eye," which is again speaking of his Nazi qualities. The mustache reference seems to put her father in a category with Hitler. In a following stanza the speaker says, "...a cleft in your chin instead of your foot but no less a devil for that..." This statement confused me at first because honestly who has a cleft in their foot? However I typed cleft foot into google and discovered the often times the devil is portrayed as an animal-like creature with hoof-like feet. This is consistent with the rest of the line when the speaker discusses the devil. Finally the speaker tries to kill herself in the 12th and 13th stanzas to reconnect with her father but fails. She then begins searching for a man who resembles her father. This man is describes as black and evil, but she decides to marry him, "And I said I do, I do." In the final stanzas the speaker overcomes both her father's haunting memory and the man she has married who resembles her father. She says, "If I've killed one man, I've killed two---" and "There's a stake in your fat, black heart..."

VOCAB:
Tyrol: Part of the Alpine mountain region, it borders Germany
Aryan: Hitler's perfect race, blond hair and blue eyes
Panzer-man: German tank drivers
Luftwaffe: German word for air force
(FOUND ALL OF THESE TERMS ON WIKIPEDIA)

Meghan McDonough
MWF 9:05-9:55

Test Blog

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.