Hadiyah's Blog

In  Wide Sargasso Sea , Antoinette marries Rochester. Rochester doesn’t love her and only married her for money. Rochester takes everything away from Antoinette, driving her mad. Her madness isn’t inherited from her mother, she’s “mad” because of her situation in this terrible marriage. Rochester, even though he doesn’t love Antoinette, needs to be in control of everything. He “owns” her, and unfortunately, at the time, the law agrees. Rochester “breaks” Antoinette. In the beginning of their marriage, he shows her some “love” and because of her past, Antoinette really wants to hold onto this feeling. But Rochester takes that away from her, he won’t give her “love”. This starts to break her because she wants this feeling so much that she would do anything. She goes to Christophine to ask for help and puts the white powder in Rochester’s drink. She basically drugs him, and you have to feel sorry for Rochester in this case. But the point is that Antoinette starts breaking when Ro...

In the first part of  The Stranger , I think that you can see many parallels to France during World War II. Specifically, I think Meursault represents The Collaboration in France, and Raymond would be like the Nazi Germans. The Collaboration in France was the group that decided to help the Germans in efforts to help themselves. They were officially neutral, but they did a lot to help the Germans. Meursault seemed like he always tried to act neutral, but he ended up helping Raymond. As time went on, the collaboration became more involved like Meursault who went from writing a letter for Raymond, to testifying as a witness for Raymond, to agreeing to help Raymond in fights, and he ends will killing the Arab. The Collaboration, similarly, wanted at first to be neutral, then they started helping the Germans round up Jews and put them in camps. They, at first, tried to only put foreign Jews into camps (because they wanted to protect French Jews), but that changed over time.  ...

Gregor wakes up as an insect and his main priority isn’t “oh no I’m a bug how do I become human again?”, it’s “oh no how am I going to get to work?” and I think that on some level this is really relatable. I think I would freak out about being an insect, but once I’ve calmed down I would have gotten stressed again about not knowing how to live my life. And it makes sense that I would care about getting to school or that Gregor cared about getting to work because those are very important things. For us, school is a must and it’s hard to miss a day because the work builds up and it just adds to the stress. For Gregor, he has to get to work because he needs this job to sustain his family. So being an insect is a lot less important than work, especially since he’s the only one working and he has to work not only to pay off his dad’s debts but also to pay for their lifestyle of lavish breakfast and having a cook and a maid. For us, school is the most important thing right now and we also h...

In  The Sun Also Rises , Jake Barnes isn’t really the most loveable character because he seems to be racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. Also, his views on masculinity are kind of annoying. Aside from all of this, there are a few times where we can relate to him.  “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” (42) Jake says that it is easy for him to act all manly during the day when he’s around others. Later at night when he is all alone, he lets himself go. You can see this when he’s around his friends he acts all superior. He thinks he’s better than Cohn and he seems to decide who is good enough to hang around with Brett. But later when he’s home alone, he starts thinking about Brett and starts to cry. Around others, he tries to act as if nothing really bothers him but alone he lets himself be sad.  He puts up a front with others. He has an act to show to the world. Doesn’t everybody? We act dif...

In  Mrs. Dalloway , Clarissa is judged by both Richard and Peter for her parties. They see it as childish or that she’s a snob. We might want to agree with them too, because why would someone like throwing parties? They seem to be trivial, just an event without real meaning. Does she want to appeal to everyone and show that she can be the “perfect hostess” or does she want to be the center of attention? What’s the big fuss about parties? Clarissa says that she throws these parties as an offering. She wants to be able to bring people together. She says that parties are her gift because she doesn’t do anything else important. She just simply likes life. I think that she just wants to make people happy. She enjoys life and she wants others to as well. She uses her parties to accomplish that.  I think this shows how even seemingly trivial things can make someone feel better, like being invited to a party and being able to socialize. Peter and Richard are wrong for thinkin...

In the Mezzanine, the passage Howie reads from his Penguin classic describes life as trivial or ephemeral. The word ephemeral in French is “éphémère”. In the book Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), this word is used to describe flowers. The Little Prince visits the planet of a geographer. The geographer asks the Little Prince to describe his planet for his geography book. When the Little Prince describes his home, he mentions his rose. The geographer says that he doesn’t write about flowers because they are ephemeral. The Little Prince asks what this means, and the geography says it means that his flower is won’t last forever, that his flower is going to disappear. This upsets the Little Prince because he realizes that his flower is going to disappear, and he left her all alone. Later on, he is on Earth and comes upon a garden of roses. He realizes that his rose isn't unique. This makes him sad because he thought his rose was important, but because she’s just an ordinary rose, t...