The end of Native Speaker was interesting.  I think that this book ties in with the same non-canonical theme as Invisible
Man.  The theme is identity.  This is also the theme that I think should get put into the canon eventually.  The theme identity has to do a lot with how the character sees or portrays him/her throughout the book.  In Invisible Man the narrator really was an invisible man.  He sort of went about his daily life not really doing anything specific, he was kicked out of college and sent to the city where he became a speaker for the Brother Hood.  He made many mistakes and it seemed as though like Amanda Lea said in class everything he had something to do with went bad eventually. In Native Speaker Henry is much like the narrator from Invisible
Man.  Henry works as a spy we find out, I think this is the first way in which identity is a theme in the book.  Henry being a spy has to play many different roles throughout the novel.  He is constantly entering people’s lives, finding information out and then disappearing.  He has to play the role of the person they want him to be.  This makes it difficult to have a personality and an identity.  I feel as though he was almost lost, and didn’t know himself who he was as a person.  Henry in the end quits his job and ends up with the one thing he knows he wants or the one thing he knows about the most…Lelia.  I think that the ending of this book makes more sense than the ending of Invisible Man where the narrator just goes crazy.  Native Speaker was one of my favorite books from this semester and one that I think will fit into the canon eventually due to its common theme of identity that is also present in books like The Sound and the Fury. 

I am still not too sure how I feel about Native Speaker.  Henry reminds me a lot of the narrator of Invisible Man the more I read.  I feel like because of his job, he doesn’t really know who he is.  If you think about it, if you had to play a lot of different identities and be a different person each time, would you really know who you were? Or for that matter, know how to act when you weren’t on the job?  I don’t think I would.  If I had a job like his and had “act” everyday and move around to different places, and deceive people, I would feel like a bad person and I wouldn’t have a very good sense of self.  I would feel as though I had no identity.  Maybe this is how Henry feels, maybe not.  Lelia seems to have a strong personality.  She knows what she wants for the most part and she does what ever she wants.  Although she does break down during the readings we just did.  Its understandable why she does though, talking about her son, and being hurt that Henry never spoke about it.  On the topic of their son Mitt, Amanda Lea made a really good point in class, that the pile up of his friends could represent all of the secrets in their lives and it eventually suffocated Mitt.  His death is very odd, you hear about people dying in all different ways as we spoke about in class, but have you every really heard of anyone getting suffocated by a group of friends and at such a young age?  I’m not really sure what is going on with kwang yet, we haven’t touched much on him in class.  He plays an important role though, because we keep getting rushed into talking about him and the Professor always says that he’s important and to not forget him.  I’m curious to see what role he plays in the story.  I’m not sure at this point why Henry is telling the story. 

The ending of Sula was different from others that we read.  Usually a book has pretty good closure and there are some questions remaining when finished.   This book however, leaves you with many questions when finished reading.  Sula herself was a very odd character.  The book sort of revolves around her and the mistakes that she makes.  Nel is her best friend and they seem to have a very good connection, they just get each other completely it seems.  Sula didn’t seem that different from others until she and Nel watch chicken little drown.  I thought that was really odd and couldn’t understand why they didn’t try to help.  Later on we find out that it was a sense of tranquility for Nel to watch him drown.  Then Sula watches her mother burn to death.  She doesn’t do anything but almost watches as if it is entertainment.  She too enjoyed watching it.  That sort of ties them together in a weird way.  Nel later gets married to Jude, and we know that Jude is only marrying her just so that he is married.  Then Sula sleeps with Jude.  Most people can’t imagine their best friend sleeping with their husband, and if that did happen, most would probably cut off ties with one or both of them.   They don’t talk for a long time until Sula is dying.  Nel goes to visit her.  I think she does this because she needs closure.  Nel gets Sula and knows that she grew up with her mother being a prostitute and for them sex just made you happy and it wasn’t a big deal.  Knowing this Nel sort of understood but as any other person would she needed closure and to hear it from Sula why she did it.  Sula says that it meant nothing and she didn’t understand why Nel couldn’t get over it.  Nel goes to Sula’s funeral and says goodbye to her.  When Sula dies the town thinks it is this great thing, and that the “witch” is dead.  What they didn’t realize though was that Sula was their way out of bad things, she was the one to blame things on.  Once she dies bad things start to happen again and I think that the town eventually realizes this.   The ending of this book leaves so many questions about Sula and Nel and both of their lives.  It was an interesting book to read, but the ending was frustrating.

I am sort of enjoying this book; I find it very different though.  It sort of reminds me of The Sound and the Fury in some ways.  It reminds me of it because it has some characters that just don’t seem right in the head.  Eva Peace delivers her sons bowel that was life threatening, leaves her children for 18 months with out telling them it would be that long.  She returns with more money than she left with and she lost her leg.  It is believed that she lost her leg on purpose for insurance money.  Later in the readings her son whom she nick named
Plum returns from war with disturbed memories and a heroine addict.  She kills him.  She seems to be a disturbed character.  Another part of the story so far that was weird was when Sula swings the boy into the river and he drowns.  Although she didn’t do it on purpose, it is just weird that nothing was done about it.  The last part of the story that I felt was important was when Hannah takes the nap and dreams about a red dress.  She then dies a little bit later in a fire, while Eva is badly injured.  I thought it was so weird that Sula saw it happen and she wasn’t afraid or upset, she seemed interested in it.  That struck me funny; if I ever saw something like that I don’t how I would get over it.  She didn’t seem to be very upset about the boy, who drowns either, which I thought was odd.

This book still seems to be pretty good, which has kept me interested in it.  The first part of chapter 11 had me a little confused as to what was going on.  So after I read it and then skimmed it again and thought about it, I had a feeling it was symbolic, I just couldn’t figure out how.  So I went to spark notes to see if the book existed there, and it did.  I clicked on chapter 11 and here is the explanation that I got for chapter 11.  Apparently the fact that he awoke in a hospital wearing white and not being able to talk means that he was experiencing rebirth.  He had no recollection of what was going on and he was unable to communicate to anyone anything.  He is not able to tell anyone his name either, giving him a new identity.  As the book goes on he ends up living at a women’s house named Mary.  Mary the virgin mother is the connection given there.  She is sweet and doesn’t make him pay, and she feeds him.  He is sort of wiped of his identity just because he loses his job, and he really doesn’t have anything left. 

Another weird happening that takes place is the yam scene.  It is very long and just about yams.  He sort of is taken back to the south during this portion of the book.  I found it weird to read because it seemed as though he was going to become a person he wanted to be finally, in stead of being what others wanted.  As the reader you finally get the feeling that although this passage is weird, that something good might actually lie ahead of him.  He has a very weird obsession with the food though.  I mean I totally get the whole you bite into something that has a memory with it and you sort of flashback for a minute and it’s a good feeling, but to go and buy to more, or to talk about it for that long is a little weird. 

As the Chapters go on to tell about how he joins this group called the Brotherhood.  The group sees him make a speech at an eviction of an elder couple’s home.  The speech is compelling and although he doesn’t get the response he was going for from the crowd, he gets them motivated and they take action.  The Brotherhood to me just seems like a way to have an identity.  Like a gang almost, it seems as though different people join for different reasons and it’s a way to have a “family”.  They ask weird favors and have weird members.   Eventually they turn there back on the narrator (who does not have a name yet), which was sort of expected.  They got him for a while and got what they wanted out of him, and as soon as he started to get too much attention himself, they got rid of him.

There were some other things in the chapters that caught my attention such as the statue that he breaks and can’t get rid of, the shooting of Clifton while he’s selling the dolls on the street, dumping the spittoon on the priests head, Ras the Exhorter and his personality and what and if he really stands for something else. 

Hopefully some things in this book will be made clearer.  I feel sort of bad for the narrator because he always ends up failing at things. 

So far I am enjoying reading this book.  It’s been an easier read than the other books so far this semester even though it is a lot longer than them.  There are a few reasons why I am enjoying this book so much more than the others.  One is definitely because it is not so far fetched as the others.  This book seems like somewhere out there someone could possibly relate to it, or understand the character.  This was not the case for some others that we have read.  The book starts fast also, it didn’t have a slow start that was dragging on; it picks right up in the first chapter.  It was graphic in the way things were described which made it unpleasant to read at times, but at the same time you feel compelled to keep reading.  The book starts out with the narrator who does not have a name yet, going to make this speech for a group of white people.  Once he arrives he finds out he is being used for other entertainment.  He is blindfolded with a number of other black men put into a boxing ring to fight; he loses in the last round.  The next task is for them to get “coins” off the floor, it is fake money and every time they touch the rug, they are electrocuted.  After this task all the men are given some real money and the narrator is told to give his speech.  During his speech many white men don’t listen to him and he has to swallow all this blood that was in his mouth.   Once all of this is over, it takes you to where he goes to college.  During the chapter, he takes a rich white man, Norton, for a ride, and gets into trouble.  Norton passes out or goes into shock based on information given to him about a man named Jim Trueblood, who impregnated his own daughter.  Norton seems too interested in this.  After this they go to a bar and a veteran who seems to have the only grasp on reality so far in the book, helps them as a riot breaks out.  As the narrator goes back to school, he gets kicked out, and sent to the
New York for a job.  He trusts that the recommendation letters given to him by Bledsoe (the president of the college), when we the reader know that the letters will do him no good. He meets the veteran on the bus because Dr. Bledsoe has sent him to a psychiatric facility.  The next few chapters are about the narrator in the city trying to find a job and what he encounters until he finally lands one. I found multiple parts so far in this book sort of hard to read.  They were graphic and gave way too much information.  I am still enjoying the book though and I am interested in what else is going to happen to the narrator as far as being the Invisible Man and not having a name. 

So our group finished At the Mountains of Madness…finally!  I didn’t really like the book, I’m not very big on sci-fi stuff.  Throughout the whole book I could not figure out why this had anything to do with what we were doing in class, especially after I looked at the other groups wiki’s and noticed their books had a lot in common with the canonical themes that we had made a list of in class.  Ours didn’t apply to many, and if they did it was sort of stretching it.  In class though our professor pointed out something that I never would have picked out on my own.  She referred it back to the underground rail road.  Now everything sort of makes sense in a different way.  The shoggoths in the book where building an underground railway of some kind and taking over, and that is what the white people back then thought.  A quote that we actually chose for a close reading has some information in it that when read with out this knowledge it doens’t make sense, but now that I know what he is really referring to, I understand it more. Here is the quote… “We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see-for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned- was something altogether different, and immeasurable more hideous and detestable. It was the utter objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform-the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.” 

Our group read the book At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.  The book was interesting to read.  It was filled with scientific words and terms that I had to constantly look up.  It was also a lot more sci-fi then I thought it was going to be.  The book starts out pretty slow and gives a lot of background information on the characters and what they are on the expedition to
Antarctica for.  After the first few chapters of revealing the characters to the audience, it starts to pick up.  There is a lot of suspense in the book as well as mystery that keeps you reading.  There are a lot of points that leave you hanging and make you feel like you have to keep reading.  Throughout the book they talk about another book called The Necronomicon.  I was curious about this book and I googled it and there was actually another wiki page on it.  The book is fake and apparently there are other authors in this genre that refer to it as well.  It is only referred to a few times throughout the novel, but enough to make you wonder what it is.  The link is here for the website with the book on it:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necronomicon .  I didn’t like the book as much as I thought I would.  It was definitely interesting to read though.  As far as the group project goes, so far it’s going good.  It’s been hard to find some information on the book and what not, but we’re working on it.    

After reading The Sound and The Fury, I have a much better understanding of canonical novels.  At first I wasn’t really sure what we were talking about when we made the list of books.  They were all popular books that you’re supposed to read.  Even if you haven’t read most of them, you sort of have an idea of what they are about, and you know the titles and authors to many with out even studying them.  These books all sort of follow the same themes and I now understand that, that’s what makes them able to join the cannon.  Although each book had the same themes in general, they all also introduced new themes that were book specific.  It seems that if you’re not in a class studying the book, these book specific themes would be over looked and ignored by just someone who picked up the book. 

The book was difficult to read, because I like books that have a purpose, like a story line from beginning to end; a book that gives you a reason to read it.  This book to me was almost like a few different little stories put together.  They each had a little story to tell about the family and then at the end it was sort of just dropped.  I liked the book for the most part, I just found it hard to read because I was never sure where it was going with the separate narratives and each person had their own point of view on things went.  In the end they all sort of went back to Caddy though.  Each chapter had something to do with her and how she ruined the family, she was sort of the obsession of everyone in the book.  I guess that’s the most I got out of it besides exploring the separate themes.  

“I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down.  I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hards off and put them in the tray.  The watch ticked on.  I turned the face up and the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any better.”

  In this passage you can tell that Quentin was really bothered.  The watch being faced down sort of says that he’s not really worried about the time or for some reason he doesn’t want to know it.  He randomly breaks this watch that his grandfather gave to his father that his father gave to him.  After that he takes the hands off of the watch and puts the glass along with the hands in the ashtray.  The watch continued to tick which shows that time goes on and feels stuck in it.  He finally turns the watch over to see the time and the clock is still ticking, it almost seems as though he thought he was going to stop time.  

I think this passage is very significant when thinking about why Quentin kills himself eventually.  It says a lot about his character and sort of sets the mood for the rest of the chapter that he is narrating.  This reminds me of the part where he tells us about Caddy.  He is so stuck in the moments that he had with her, that he can’t move past it, therefore being stuck in time.  In real life this reminds me of two of my friends that during high school and this past fall commited suicide.  They both seemed really happy on the outside, but they obviously had some inner thoughts that were driving them crazy. The only way they see out is to die.  I think that is exactly how Quentin felt, that his memories were taking over his life allowing him to do nothing but be stuck in time, and it made him feel as though there was only one way out.  I think this beginning passage really helps us to get a good idea about Quentin.  It should if looked at the right way and not ignored, give us a good idea about how he feels and what is really bothering him.  The rest of the chapter he sort of ignores time and I think he finally sees what time it is towards the end.  This chapter is full of hidden meanings and starting right with the first paragraph, you just have to read into them, and I think the meanings behind the watch are a good indication of how the chapter is going to go.