Gatsby: The Green Light

"Involuntarily I glanced seaward -- and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock" (The Great Gatsby, 21).

After Nick's comically horrible dinner party in East Egg, he sees Mr. Gatsby alone outside of his mansion stretching his arms out toward the water and trembling. All that Nick sees is a green light across the water, which I decided must be a symbol for something! For Gatsby, the green light represented something for which he was hoping, searching, and yearning. Or, you know, someone.

Chapter four presents Jordan Baker's little frame story that unites all of Nick's previous anecdotes. Jordan tells Nick, "Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years" (77). That was back in the dinner party from chapter one when Jordan brought up the name Gatsby, someone she knew from West Egg. Jordan also tells Nick, "Then he [Gatsby] began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found" (79). That was back in chapter three when Gatsby secretly spoke to Jordan, leaving Nick alone to observe Gatsby's inebriated guests.

Jay Gatsby and Daisy Fay shared a brief special connection in the past but then went their separate ways. When they reunite in chapter five, Mr. Gatsby tells Daisy, "'You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock'" (92). Nick eloquently notes, "His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one" (93). Even though years passed, Gatsby has maintained his (slightly creepy) wonder and appreciation for Daisy Buchanan.

I think this is an important theme in the novel about the obsession of the determined heart of man. "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart" (96).

"Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of use lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair" ("A Rose for Emily," 60).

How many people used that quote, do you think? Also, I had to read this story a few times to understand; the chronology is all mixed up, which is nice and rhetorical and everything, but it's not easy to read.

The evidence seems to be there that Emily murdered Homer -- the poison she bought, the iron-gray hair, and the presence of his body in her house. I'm going to talk about motivation; why would Emily murder Homer? Let's take a look at some possibilities!

• The town pressed her for taxes (4).
• Her father died (15).
• Potentially, she was crazy (28).
• Homer was not a good fit for her -- a Yankee, a foreman (30).
• Homer himself liked men (43).

There are clues all over the story that foreshadow Emily's murdering Homer. She handles situations without leaving her house, as she did with the people collecting taxes, and she clings to people after they die, as she did with her dead father. It's likely that because Homer was not a good fit for Emily and he liked men, Emily could not leave him the way a normal person would. She left him Emily-style -- she didn't leave her house, and she clung to his dead body.

This is all kind of gross.

Pain or guilt? Or am I the only person who cares about this scrap of paper?

"The paper curled as Mr. Kapasi wrote his address in clear, careful letters. She would write to him, asking about his days interpreting at the doctor's office, and he would respond eloquently, choosing only the most entertaining anecdotes, ones that would make her laugh out loud as she read them in her house in New Jersey" ("Interpreter of Maladies," 89).

The central conflict in this story is emotional, inside Mr. Kapasi, and in response to Mrs. Question Four (that question is a girl), I would argue that the conflict is resolved. During the story, Mr. Kapasi develops of "feeling of intoxication" for Mrs. Das, who his unhappily married like himself (79). The "scrap of paper" (88) on which he wrote his address serves as a metaphor for Mr. Kapasi's fantasy-relationship with Mrs. Das, which changes throughout the plot.

Mr. Kapasi first develops his feelings for Mrs. Das just before he writes his information on the scrap of paper, and once he does, the fantasy begins. "The promise that he would hear from Mrs. Das" (89) makes everything in the world seem right. Later, he develops a desire to be "alone with her" (100) and an obsession with when he will hear back from her (109). The feeling begins to fade when Mrs. Das assumed that Mr. Kapasi had children (147 -- my favorite integer). By the time the paper "fluttered away in the wind" (179), Mr. Kapasi preserves an image of the Das family from the monkey attack, which is not a particularly flattering image.

When the scrap of paper was in Mrs. Das's purse, Mr. Kapasi fantasized about their potential relationship. When the paper was absent from the purse, Mr. Kapasi had no intimate feelings toward Mrs. Das. Thus, the presence of the scrap of paper is a metaphor for that fantasy-relationship.

If I define the major conflict in the story as Mr. Kapasi's internal relationship development with Mrs. Das, then the conflict is resolved. When the scrap of paper flies away, Mr. Kapasi has come to the conclusion that he has different family values than Mrs. Das, and she does not have any feelings for him.

No Post on Sundays

"I was always smiling when the mailman got there, and continued smiling even after he gave me the mail and I saw today wasn't the day" ("How I Met My Husband," 196).

That, Mr. Question One, is where my expectations as a reader were overturned definitively. That's not to say that there weren't elements throughout the plot that suggested the turn of events at the end of the story.

The plot structure was mostly chronological with two exceptions -- a flashback (the story of how Edie got her job) and a few subtle references to the future. For the most part, the flashback characterized Edie as common and humble (making her a sympathetic character) as she dropped out of school and started simple work (23-24). The future references, on the other hand, foreshadowed the end of the story. Phrases like "I see that now, but didn't then" (157) and "I didn't figure out till years later" (195) suggested an impending shift in Edie's life in which she would become wiser.

Another element within the plot was the slow revelation that Chris Waters was arguably very unsuitable for Edie. He was engaged to Alice (93), was not very close with her (117), and cheated on her -- without intimacy, of course (143). The simple girl, Edie, needed someone who was ready to settle down, a prerequisite Chris clearly did not meet (I originally typed "meat").

Although I did not completely expect Edie to settle down with someone other than Chris until the second-to-last page of the story, I recognize that the arrangement of the plot gave me, the reader, clues about Edie's future with not Chris but Carmichael.

YOU'RE an oxymoron!

The number of poems I analyze and my level of maturity are inversely proportional, so I apologize.

"A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness" ("Delight in Disorder," 1-2).

I have a huge problem with Google Chrome's thinking that "villanelle" is a spelling error while "wantonness" is just fine. It's not even in my AHD! Oh, yes it is. Apparently, it's the noun form of "wanton," which means "immoral or unchaste." I'm going to leave it up in the air as to what the speaker is saying in those two lines. Anyway, my purpose in quoting that line was to point out the oxymoron "sweet disorder."

The speaker draws a lot of parallels between disorder/wildness and sweetness/civility, so he's very interested in waffles. I mean, he's very interested in disorder. This is reflected very nicely in the poem's structure! Allow me to explain.

The lines of the poem are not as pretty as they could be because the lengths of the lines are kind of jagged. Also, the rhyming is a little bit off, but it's there -- "thrown" and "distraction" (3-4), for instance. It has a continuous structure, so it's not cut up into nice even little stanzas. The poem has a certain degree of disorder to it, just like what the speaker likes!

"And took he forth a saw, and cleft her in twain."

"Till the Spinner of the Years / Said 'Now!' And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres" ("The Convergence of the Twain," 31-33).

The only other time I remember hearing the word "twain" is in Rowan Atkinson's "Amazing Jesus." The part I quoted is between 2:35 and 2:55:

At first, when I read the title and the helpful epigraph, I thought that the "twain" might have been two halves of the ship, or something. Did the Titanic break in two? I don't know these things.

However, the "twain" are the vain and "opulent" Titanic (8) and its "sinister mate" (19), the iceberg. Of course, the poem's denotative situation is the meeting of those two separate spheres. What I liked about the structure was that in each stanza, there were two lines of approximate length x followed by a third line of approximate length 2x. The stanza construction in which two lines "converged" into a third line that was twice as long reflects the convergence of the Titanic and the iceberg.

The other question I want to answer is what I think of the "Immanent Will" and the "Spinner of the Years." I absolutely loved the final stanza where "the Spinner of the Years / Said 'Now!'" (31-32). At first, it made me think of God's commands in the creation story. However, I don't think God is the undefined Being in the poem. The text says that the Being created "a sinister mate" (19), which is not what an benevolent God would do; it also uses the word "consummation" (33), which suggests to me a fulfillment of what was inevitably going to occur. Therefore, I think the "Immanent Will" and the "Spinner of the Years" are fate.

I need some more tissues if I want to keep analyzing this one.

"A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning / In Eden garden" ("Spring," 10-11).

Hopkins's central point is his first sentence: "Nothing is so beautiful as spring" (1). The poem's imagery effectively reflects that beauty of spring. "Echoing timber" (4), leaving and blooming peartrees (6), and a blue sky "all in a rush" (7) within the first stanza let the reader experience the most rich and beautiful facets of spring. As I read this poem, my eyes got watery and I sneezed a few times, so the imagery also messed with my allergies. This is true -- I have witnesses.

This poem contains two allusions in the final two stanzas. First, Hopkins relates Spring to the beauty of the Garden of Eden. The poem glorifies the beauty of spring, but then presents a contrasting warning -- "Have, get, before it cloy" (11). I think that Hopkins wants to express that spring is so beautiful that it cannot last, and anything that precedes or follows it cannot compare to its "sweet being." Next, "Spring" discusses the "innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy" (13). The purpose of the convergence of these two allusions is to realize both the beauty and the innocence of Spring that we must embrace while it lasts.

Hopkins could have reworded a few lines to express his point more clearly, but the poem would have lost its rhyming structure and alliteration. The second line's alliteration jumped out at me -- "when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush" -- because it gave the poem a rhythm I could follow. The soft, rhythmic consonants repeated in these lines reflect the subtle, sequenced season of Spring. That . . . was unintentional. But I like it.

For the record, I think that this poem's central theme is moot for people who have to deal with this:

Beyond Hailsham: "A Fantasy Land"

"This might all sound daft, but you have to remember that to us, at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn't possible there" (Never Let Me Go, 66).

There's a structural thing in the chapters that's been bugging me (besides the sub-par grammar, I mean). The book, so far, has been based on a bunch of interconnected anecdotes and hasn't been one fluid story, which is fine. But every time Ishiguro introduces a new anecdote, he puts this at the end of the previous one: "And all of that changed the one time that [some person] and I [past tense activity]." Then, there's a line break and the next anecdote starts. I suppose it's nice that there's a pattern.

I'm not complaining about the anecdotes themselves, though. They're doing a good job of slowly creating a world about which I know very little but increasingly more.

I haven't decided yet if the world is a kind-of-utopia like in Brave New World. Miss Lucy's character has kind of been acting as a window into the secret world around the students -- apparently smoking for them was worse than smoking for her (68). Also, like in Brave New World, the characters can't have babies (73).

In Brave New World in your pants, the characters all knew about the mysterious world, and the reader was slowly introduced to it. I like the difference in Never Let Me Go in that we're kind of learning about the "fantasy land" at the same speed as the characters; it makes me feel more included in the book.