I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. - Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. - GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. - Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. - Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

I am an invisible man. - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. - Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. - Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
For a long time, I went to bed early. - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. - Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
It was love at first sight. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? - Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. - George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. - David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

Another Brick In The Wall

In Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”, the wall represents schisms of communication and cultural exchange. The title has a dual meaning: It signifies the action of mending the wall, as well as the wall that mends. We must also note that in the former interpretation, the noun ‘wall’ is vague. Is it plural or singular?; General or specific?

The “Something there is that doesn't love a wall” also has two possible approaches. The “something” can be the very narrator who begins to doubt the repairs he feels forced to complete, as we see when he inquires, "Why do they make good neighbours? / Isn't it Where there are cows? / But here there are no cows. / Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence. In this poem with a predominant iambic pentameter meter, the other “something there that doesn’t love a wall” can also be a force of natural attraction. Maybe the wall is not destined to exist where and when it does. Even the narrator acknowledges the silliness in their efforts to keep the wall upright, for he or she says that “We have to use a spell to make them balance: / "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"” The poem questions the validity of comfort zones, for the wall represents a comfortable, yet invasive and ephemeral area that blocks a path. Where does this path originate? What is its destination?

The narrator analyzes the blind determination of his companion, when he “[…] see[s] him there / Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. / He moves in darkness as it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees”. This darkness in which he moves represents the ignorance of his faith and effort. He does not know where he is going, or why, and yet goes without question, for “He will not go behind his father's saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well / He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours"”. Here we see a practiced custom, maintained by fear and repetition, which yields to a comfortable slavery. The poem seems to criticize those who blindly follow others to remain in their comfort zone. It praises the incentive required to inspire doubt, and the initiative employed in expressing it by rejecting the norm.

A Sunny Mourning

In Kevin Young’s “The Mission”, he contrasts light and dark imagery to portray the dichotomy of life and death. By employing elements of satire, he gives the comparison an ironic tone. The poem’s purpose is to find grim humor in the eternal cycle of life, grievance, and death. The fact that humor is present in a poem with death as a topic is ironic in itself.

Contrasting imagery first appears when Young writes “of cars, lights low / as talk, idling dark”. The other instance where this is seen is when he complains of how “The sun / is too bright. / Your eyes / adjust, become / like the night. Hands / covering the face— / its numbers dark / & unmoving”.

By saying, “Mornings or dead / of night”, he plays with the wording, and the expression “dead of night”. This is an ironic description, for the poem concerns death. Furthermore, the word “morning” is a homophone to the word ‘mourning’, which would be considered a pun if its spelling were different. Peoples’ existence, thus, is either spent mourning, or in a grave.

The statement, “He kept everything / but alive”, exemplifies a type of humor that manipulates the words ‘he kept everything’. On one hand, it can mean that the father maintained control over his belongings. Alternately, the second line establishes the humor by posing a secondary definition for the phrase, as “he kept himself everything but alive”, meaning that the deceased one fervently, yet pointlessly kept his health. This poses another irony, which satirizes the effort to preserve the body and avoid an unavoidable death.

Such satiric humor wishes to criticize a society of monotonous and continuous sorrow, for “I have come to know / sorrow’s / not noun / but verb”. We must learn, according to the poem, to regard death more lightly.

The 40-Minute World is Not Enough

In Adrienne Rich’s “Storm Warnings”, we see metaphors comparing hostile weather to inner tempest and unwelcome change. The title, “Storm Warnings”, represents the uselessness of predictions to cope with a challenging experience. These forecasts signal an uncomfortable, and unalterable event, one that “clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter” (17).

The first line compares “the glass [that] has been falling all the afternoon” (1) to clear raindrops. The “instrument” (2) mentioned in the next line literally refers to a barometer or thermometer, commonly used to analyze weather. Metaphorically, we can also consider the news as an instrument for weather forecast, or any upcoming change in the surroundings. Because the narrator knows better than these instruments, he or she accepts that they undermine reality, and, thus, the narrator braces for the incoming change. This first stanza depicts a specific case of the repetitive phenomenon described in the last stanza. In a way, this organization illustrates an eternal loop.

The weather and its changes not only represent, literally, a storm, but they also metaphorically symbolize social unrest outside of the shelter that is the home. Likewise, the metaphor indicates inner turmoil.

Time is given a hazardous, aggressive, and mysterious personality, when Rich commands the reader to “[…] think again, as often when the air / Moves toward a silent core of waiting, / How with a single purpose time has travelled / By secret currents of the undiscerned / Into its polar realm” (8-12). The “single purpose” makes the change a determined one. The “silent core of waiting” describes the peace the such a change feels it must disrupt, and the undiscerned winds contrast with determination of its travels to give the change a “polar personality”.

We see the metaphor deepen when Rich writes how “Weather abroad / And weather in the heart alike come on / Regardless of prediction” (12-14). Here we see the futility of knowledge, hypotheses, instruments, and theories when faced against the actual event. Furthermore, the metaphor’s inclusion of inner discomfort is clearly seen in this citation. She emphasizes the ineffectiveness of preparation by saying how “Between foreseeing and averting change / Lies all the mastery of the elements / Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter” (15-17).

The narrator exposes the prison of unheralded change by explaining how all the preparations are “[…] the things we have learned to do / Who live in troubled regions” (27-28).

BUZZZZZZ.

Never Blue Enough

During the few days that Pecola had her "bluest eyes" (203), she was undoubtedly in a state of ecstasy. The conversation she had with Claudia represents an existential debate over the meaning of happiness, beauty, and love. They question the source of joy when Pecola asked:

"But suppose my eyes aren't blue enough?

Blue enough for what?

Blue enough for . . . I don't know. Blue enough for something. Blue enough . . . for you" (203)!

Pecola considers a happiness dependent on external components. In her comparisons, and search for certainty that her eyes are, indeed, the blues eyes, she loses herself, only to find that "the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (204). Here we see a Hinduist component of the novel, where the journey is the destination, and dreams remain dreams. Soaphead Church never achieves to become a clergyman, just as Pecola remained without public appreciation, and Pauline Breedlove never encountered her ideal mate or home. This novel is littered with disappointment, and yet, curiously, some characters possess joy. The three whores, for instance, live without guilt or worry. This made me question what type of personality is needed to attain unconditional happiness.

This is a novel with many erotic scenes of varied nature. None of them are conventional, for we see Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove sustain violent acts of love, Soaphead Church display controversial sexual tendencies, Cholly suffer an unfortunate childhood experience involving an untimely flashlight, and Geraldine feel obligated to indulge in repulsive interactions with her husband, which contrasts to the fetish focused on her pet. We can conclude that "love is never any better than the lover" (205). This is a realistic (cynic?) line, for it removes love from the pedestal it holds in the emotional pyramid. It is usually coupled with the idealistic hope of a "perfect love". Being based on the lover, who is undoubtedly imperfect, love becomes an imperfect sentiment.

Beauty: A highly controversial concept throughout the ages. My sister is currently working on a semester-long research paper on the perceptions of beauty and how culture, religion, and environment shape its definition. I will not tire my readers with an extensive discussion on this matter, but I will say this: By the end of the novel, Morrison emphasizes the vagueness and pointlessness of some of mankind's fiercest quests; those of perfect love, happiness, and beauty.

The Creative Reader

In her interview, Tony Morrison discusses one of her techniques to describe her characters (minute 14). She limits the details she uses, to allow the reader's imagination to flow and construct its own imagery. Although oblivious to this method, I enjoyed forming specific physical characteristics on my own. As Morrison explains, when she leaves the creativity of the character to the reader, "he or she owns it" (14:14).

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison illustrates Geradline's personality by simply demonstrating her actions. For instance, "Geraldine did not allow her baby, Junior, to cry" (87). We see her characteristic reactions when she commands Pecola to ""get out," she said, her voice quiet. "You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house"" (92). With this simple statement, a complete figure blossoms in my imagination. She reminds me somewhat of Harry Potter's Professor Dolores Umbridge. Her cat obsession, coupled with a sterile personality and explosive, bizarre reactions dapple her with pure maliciousness. I loathed her each time her figure matured in my mind. I enjoyed finishing Winter, because I appreciated Morrison's dexterity in evoking such an intense emotion within me, employing few, expectably insufficient details.

Freud And Zombies

I recently stumbled upon an interesting link while scavenging for René Descartes' biography in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The link to 'zombies' drew my eyes and made me wonder how the world of philosophy views the mindless creature. I expected to find a description of a nightmarish animal. From the few apocalyptic films that show them (SHORT LIST), one learns to fear their thirst for blood, which lacks the elegance of vampires'. After reading how zombies are humans without consciousness (by definition), I couldn't help but recall what we have learned in class about Freud's ideas on the subject. We see a meditating Buddha, a puny mortal, and a mindless zombie depict the three states of mind.