Cover letter for response paper

Dear Blog Reader,

I feel the need to write a cover letter about this paper as the story behind is so utterly enthralling. So here it goes.

So, before spring break, after we finished Slaughterhouse-Five, Mr. Mitchell wisely advised us to jot down some notes about the book so that we would be able to write about the book after a whole, wonderful week away. I, being the conscientious student that I am, did jot down a couple ideas in my notebook. Unfortunately, when I returned from the sun and sand of Costa Rica to the cold, clouds of Champaign, I revisited my notes only to find that I had completely forgotten all points supporting the theses in my notebook. (The relaxation of the week had a poor effect on my mind.) So that was pretty frustrating because I had a bunch of ideas that had remained incomplete and useless.

I decided to revisit the book to try and refresh my memory and look at passages I had marked and notes I had scrawled that could aid me in my quest for a topic. I needed a starting point for my search and cleverly chose the first chapter because it is first and because it is a really unique way to start a book. I marked a few passages and jotted down some observations but nothing struck me. I continued through different sections of the book that stood out in my mind and proceeded similarly. When I was done, I had four passages marked and a bunch of scattered notes, but one passage that I hadn't even marked continued to stand out to me.

I read and re-read that passage in question but I was unable to articulate what it was about the passage that made it seem significant to me. Then the idea hit me: I would do a passage explication. Thinking back to the days of Sophomore English, I remembered my Paradise Lost paper that explicated a section of the epic poem. That paper not being my best work, I was hesitant to start writing this paper in the fear that I wouldn't be able to come up with enough interesting, relevant observations about my extremely short passage to fill accomplish the page requirement. My other fear was that a passage any longer would lead to an lengthy paper with little focus. Finally, I concluded that I was a year more experienced and much more interested and, though explicating passages has not been my forte in the past, I wanted to just go for it. One gets bored of continuously producing response papers of the same style.

The paper is finished and the ordeal over.

Sincerely,
Juliana Trach

"Slaughterhouse Five" and "The Stranger"

After the discussion we were having on Tuesday(?) I kept thinking about the comparison that I started about Slaughterhouse Five and Camus' The Stranger and I felt like I needed to talk about it a little on the blog. For me, comparing two novels, especially one that I analyzed as thoroughly as The Stranger, helps me come to a deeper understanding of the books. Seeing similarities in two different books is like having different perspectives on an idea. So, here it goes:

The first similarity I want to look at is the protagonists from the two novels. Billy and Meursault exhibit many of the same character traits. What comes to mind first for me is the discussion of their innocence. In both novels, the protagonist acts strangely in the situation they are in and we, in class as readers, excused both of them because we were sympathetic to their "innocence" as we called it. So both books have men that we label as "innocence" in similar ways. Their innocence stems from the idea that they don't understand their situations or specifically the consequences that could arise as a result of their actions. They're innocence presents itself in a similar way too, passivity in life and naivete of consequence. Both of them are sort of infuriating, yet endearing.

Second, they both are "unstuck from time", so to speak. Billy's story in Slaughterhouse Five literally skips around in time but Meursault also has difficulty with keeping track of time. A couple examples of Meursault's unstuck-ness stand out in my mind. First, when he is sitting on his balcony watching life go by him for an undetermined period of time he seems unstuck and when he is in his jail cell and loses track of the days. Maybe Meursault is not as blatantly unstuck in time but if I had my book (which I don't because I'm in a hotel room in Fort Wayne, IN using my only free minutes to write this) I could find the passage that I'm thinking of that made me make the comparison. I'll find it when I get home. Basically, the way Camus writes the book makes the reader lose track of time. Time is not measured by days or clocks but rather when Meursault is hungry because really nothing else matters.

Anyways, along with being unstuck in time, both protagonists seem thoroughly disconnected with reality. They both operate under a unique set of ideas. Billy's life philosophy is deeply connected with what he learned from the Trafalmadorians rather than on earth and who knows where Meursault's moral thinking came from. Through their different life philosophies, they both come to be more resigned to the facts of life and death and passive in the way that they live their lives. Billy's mantra that emphasizes this idea is "So it goes." He learned from the Trafalmadorians that all moments are already structured and unchangable. He understand cruelty, tragedy, and death as awful but as things that he cannot change. Billy passively exists, knowing what he does is not his own choice. Meursault has a similar feeling of helplessness. His mantra is "it didn't matter". Like Billy, Meursault feels like his life makes no impression on the world and thus he has no ambition to act. Meursault follows Raymond's plan because he feels it doesn't matter what he does. So for a quick comparison: Billy is resigned that moments are structure already; Meursault thinks his actions bare no consequence but the result is the same. Both characters live passively as a result of their assertion that what they do is of absolutely no consequence.

My reactions to the two characters are different. I like Meursault. I find him endearing. I loved writing my research paper about how Stewart Gilbert made him look like a meanie. Billy, on the other hand, I find much less sympathetic. I don't dislike him however, I just occasionally become extremely annoyed with him. I think I was talking about this in class and I couldn't pin-point exactly why I found Meursault so much more compelling than Billy. First, I do think doing a really in-depth paper about Meursault kind of bound me to him but also I think that Meursault's "innocence" is more compelling. I really wouldn't call Billy's weirdness "innocence" and I think that why I turned off to him because in class we were so off base with why he acts so oddly. Rather than innocence being his excuse, I think a cultural difference is a more fitting comparison. He doesn't fit in because he subscribes to the Trafalmadorian world view whereas we are not told that Meursault was taught his world view, he presumably created it by observing the world. He looked around and drew a conclusion, right or wrong, and stuck to it, much like a child who just bases all his or her ideas on what it immediately before them.

I think the comparison between The Stranger and Slaughterhouse Five is really interesting and could even be taken farther than what I've done here-- moving into an analysis of themes-- even though some people in class didn't quite agree with my points. Personally, textual comparison is helpful in understanding why an author might make the choices that they do. I briefly compared Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo in my last essay to clarify a point. You can use one novel to enhance another.

Defining Jes' Grew....

So this is another post are I started right before Agora days and just finished off.

Jes' Grew is obviously a central issue and plot engine in Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed but it is also one of the more ambiguous and unfamiliar concepts that the book introduces. So, how is a reader to understand a book at all when they don't understand what the main theme is? And, why would an author ever want to write a book whose central theme is so unclear? These are questions that I was thinking about while reading. Through class discussion and mulling over readings in my head, I have come up with a few speculations and ideas about Jes' Grew that I find satisfactory. Since we are just finishing the book now, I think that a blog post discussing all the clues about Jes' Grew is in order to round off my thoughts and bring the novel completely to a close. With that I begin:

Jes' Grew is introduced in the first chapter of the book as an epidemic disease that is rapidly consuming the nation. The reader is now intrigued but soon the intrigue turns to confusion when the reader begins to realize that the "victims" of Jes' Grew are suffering from symptoms that make them sing and dance. Slowly, the reader realizes that Jes' Grew is not an actual "disease" but on the contrary, somehow related to music, specifically the newer "race music" like jazz that was sweeping the country amongst young people despite the efforts of the older generation to stop it.

In class, we equated Jes' Grew to jazz culture and music but, by the end of the book it is obvious that this equation is not quite correct. Jes' Grew dies out but Jazz does not. So the question is: if Jes' Grew does not equal jazz (although they are related) what is it? We almost must add one more idea to our analysis, the fact that the supporters of Jes' Grew feel that Jes' Grew is more alive and effective without a text. So add that to the question.

I want to propose that Jes' Grew is the feeling related to the act of taking part in a counterculture specifically having to do with art. It is almost a feeling of rebellion. This also goes back to the idea of art "dying" in museums and cultures becoming museum pieces. What evokes the wild responses from the public is not just the music but the novelty of it and that slight feeling that maybe someone infected with Jazz is getting away with something. Jazz music is still played and popular but yet there are no "epidemics" of jazz where the nation can't resist the music. Why? because the Jes' Grew is gone. Jazz has museums, festivals, and a hall of fame now. It is not novel. It is not counter-cultural. It's just a genre of music now and as it became a genre, more and more criteria were imposed upon it to keep it within the confines of the newly created genre. The jazz musicians from the first generations wanted to be recognized as a legitimate style of music but with recognition came standardization and the music is turned into a concept. Jes' Grew dies and its a museum piece.

I just want to briefly mention an example I brought up in class: graffiti culture. In America, graffiti is seen as vandalism. It seems to just grow overnight and the government wants to stop it. In some cities in Europe, on the other hand, graffiti is seen as an art form and a way for the city to make money so the city rents walls and garage doors to artists who paint only their rented space. The art form has really developed there as a result but not without a casualty, Jes' Grew. There are two effects of Jes' Grew's death. First, the statements that the graffiti make tend to be less radical because the government knows exactly who painted what. Second, paying the government to do their art seems like selling out to the more extreme artists.

So, my conclusion is that Jes' Grew is not jazz music or culture, or anything material for that matter. Jes' Grew is a feeling. A feeling that inspires people and incites the creation of art. A Jes' Grew text is not significant because a text could just compromise the idea of Jes' Grew completely. Mumbo Jumbo is not the only example of Jes' Grew either. As PaPa LaBas says, it has popped up many times and will always continue to arise.