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How Bad Was Slavery Really?

    Beloved has a lot of flashbacks to the past, specifically, and probably most importantly, in Sethe's past. Sethe is the main character of Beloved , and she is a former slave. The book isn't told in first-person narration, but it's told in third-person narration, but it does a really good job at describing the certain emotions that the characters in this book feel and also the kinds of thoughts that they think. And through that expertise in writing, we can clearly see Sethe's intention when she does what she does which to other people may seem insane, but it does make sense when you realize how much she's been through. To hide the severity of how badly slaveowners treated their slaves is to hide the truth from modern-day readers, no matter how disturbing, gruesome, and violent that the truth may be.     But in this blog post, we are going to specifically talk about the flashbacks regarding Sethe, specifically regarding slavery. In those flashbacks, we see Sethe b...
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Mersault's Strange Character

    Mersault is one of the most interesting, unique characters I have personally ever seen in a literary book such as this one. Mersault's character is very mellow and emotionless, and it seems that the way that he lives his life is just to ride the waves of life, and no matter how tumultuous and hard life may be, he just keeps riding the waves without showing any care or emotion as to what life throws his way. In fact, Mersault almost never shows emotion to anything throughout the course of the book. He does get annoyed by things that he find to be inconveniences, but even then, eh doesn't make it clear to others what he feels or what he thinks about a certain scenario. Mersault is either an extremely resilient person, or he's so disconnected from basic human morals that he simply cannot feel basic human moral emotions, like pity or shame.      At the start of the book, Mersault's mother died, and it didn't really seem that he was as emotionally affected by his...
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Jake's Sarcastic Ending Dialogue

    Jake is the main character of The Sun Also Rises , and he's also a very interesting character, too. I particularly find his relationship with Brett to also be very interesting and unique. Jake and Brett's relationship is more emotional than it is romantic. We have Brett, who I think is a very interesting lady, who has a lot of men whom she likes and likes her back, and we have Jake, who seems to never fail to support Brett and help her in her times of trouble. While they are more attached emotionally, we do see them be romantically attached to one another, as we see them hug and kiss multiple times. But going back to Jake being an interesting character, he also seems to display a fair share of sarcasm and satire in this book. The best way to observe this sarcasm and satire is by looking at the context; otherwise, it's very hard to tell whether or not he is being sarcastic.     In the last line of the book, we see Jake and Brett together, and Brett says that ...
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Clever Use of The Third Person in Mrs. Dalloway

    Novels are generally written in first-person mode. This is so that when you're reading the book, you are in the same shoes as the main character, or rather, a character who is important, but is not actually the main character. There are books that exist in which the main character isn't actually the person telling the story, but is another character that is very close to the main character, such as in The Great Brain series, in which the person narrating the book is the younger brother to the person that is the actual star of the book. But first person is used so that you can better relate to the character's thoughts and emotions, and understand why the character acts the way they do. You'll understand their personality better, too.      Instead of using the first-person, Virginia Woolf writes this novel in the third person in such a way in which you can directly relate to the characters within the novel. We have Clarissa Dalloway, who the book is named aft...
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The Slow Motion Element of The Mezzanine

    In almost all novels, there is some element of slow motion. Whenever the novel is describing certain scenery, for example, let's say the character walks into a room, the novel would take a pause to describe how the room looks like so that you can create for yourself a vague image in your head of how the room looks like. Books and stories are meant to either be listened to or read, and through your listening and reading, you make an image in your head to visualize the events that are occurring in the book. Otherwise, it would be pretty difficult to  understand  the book, or to keep up with it.  The Mezzanine takes this slow motion element in the book, and flexes it. Not only is he using this element to describe the events of this book, he uses it a lot when he's talking about (or rather, thinking about) past events that has happened in his life. Not just past events, but thoughts about the most arbitrary things. He is very introspective about the things that...
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