Hadiyah's Blog

In chapter 23 of  Invisible Man , the narrator finally realizes how terrible the Brotherhood is and he recognizes his invisibility. He talks about how the Brotherhood sacrifices the weak. He mentions how everybody has wanted to sacrifice him for “his good” but they were the ones that actually benefited. He also realizes that Jack is just like Norton and Emerson because they all tried to force their picture of reality onto him without giving any consideration to how he saw things. The narrator now realizes how he’s always being used or “kept running”, and now he’s noticed that no one has cared about how he really felt. He has realized that no one truly sees him, that he is in fact invisible.  During the narrator’s meeting with the committee and Hambro, we get more insight into how the Brotherhood views things. Their views end up sounding pretty disturbing. Hambro starts talking about sacrifice. They’re just going to have to sacrifice the narrator’s members because “the int...

In  Invisible Man  chapter 13, the narrator is walking along and passes by a window, and he wants to punch it.  “I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. ‘You too can be truly beautiful,’ a sign proclaimed. ‘Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.’ I hurried on, suppressing a savage urge to push my fist through the pane.” (262) Reading this made me feel very uncomfortable. This whole idea of people with darker skin needing to be whiter to really be pretty is disgusting. This isn’t an old idea either, and it’s still prevalent today. My family is from Pakistan and we visit there often, and the desire to have fair skin there is insane. One of the most famous brands in Pakistan is Fair & Lovely. They sell things like creams and face washes with the purpose of lightening your skin so that you are fair and lovely. Women will use fac...

In chapter 1 of  Invisible Man , the narrator takes part in a battle royal where he fights his classmates while blindfolded. Afterwards, they try to grab money off of an electrified rug. This entire scene felt very nightmarish and the oddest part about it was how the narrator seemed to accept all that was happening and only cared about the speech he had to give. We found it so odd that his only concern was his speech instead of the fact that he had to suffer through this nightmare of an event. Even while giving his speech, he’s so focused on making it perfect that he just casually swallows his blood. When discussing this chapter in class, I remembered a book that I read last year for 20 th Century Novel,  The Metamorphosis . The book opens with the main character, Gregor, waking up as a huge monstrous insect. The odd thing is that his main priority isn’t how to become human again, but instead how is he going to get to work? This book had a very nightmarish aspect to it be...

all posts from now on will be for african-american lit

           Song of Solomon puts a lot of focus on the past. Most of Milkman’s story is about his parents and Pilate’s past. Most of part one is learning about his family’s history and it sets the stage for part two where Milkman goes on a “quest for gold”. One theme in the book is how Milkman doesn’t really look to the future and how he is really passive. He doesn’t really plan for the future and only can see the past, as shown by the car ride in chapter 2, “But riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going – just where he had been – troubled him” (32). This shows how he can’t really see the whole picture, only the past. Milkman’s “quest for gold” is him trying to look to the future and start being more active. He wants to be able to get away from his family but to get to his future he needs to learn more about his family’s past. Milkman’s future is very much influenced by his family’s past and heritage....

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.  ...