Lit Analysis 

Ok so has anyone received peer reviews?  I have only received one and I know the final is due Thursday the 2nd so trying to get a head start.  

This week I really enjoyed reading plays, although I didn't think I would.  Most of the plays we read told stories with great meaning to them.  I enjoyed learning about the different plays, how they are written, and the terminology behind them even though it still confuses me some.

This week we read the poem "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa.  I enjoyed this poem as I used it told a story of a veteran who is visiting the Vietnam War Memorial Wall.  This was significant to me because I used to pass this wall every day when I lived in the D.C. area, it was on my way to work.  This poem hit me hard as I realized how many times I had passed that same wall without even thinking twice about the names etched into the wall and the lives that were taken to save mine.  The author used symbols to tell his story.  One example of symbolism in this poem is on line 10, "a women's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair."

This week our reading were focused on poems.  Reading poems has always been a challenge for me.  I often have a hard time understand the authors irony and theme.
"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke tells a story of a dad who has drank to much whisky and is dancing clumsy around the kitchen with his son.  As the dance abrasively around the kitchen items fall of shelves, and mom is not happy.  Dad breath smells of whiskey, and his rough knuckles held the boys wrist.  The son does not enjoy the dance, but "hung on like death."  The boys ear is scraped by the dads belt buckle and the dad keeps time by hitting the boy on the head.  At the end the dad dances the boy off the bed.

This poem had a rough, negative attitude towards the dad, but yet I thought the author was trying the be somewhat joyful with the rhythms like knuckle and buckle.  I concentrated more on the drunken roughness of the father and how many children today are living the same circumstances.

One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich


I enjoyed this reading and the authors ability to paint an image of what our ancestors had to endure.  I found the reading to lack action.  The story told of small traumas and occurences but I felt it lacked progression.  I wonder if this was intended by Solzhenitsyn as he was trying to potray the life of a prisoner is boring.

I also found it interesting how the prisoners developed their own small society within the camp.  It contained rich and poor, leaders and followers, thieves and rule followers who were all striving for personal success and survival, similar to our own society.

I felt the title created a sense of expectation and then replaced it with a negative sense of Shukhov's difficulty living in the camp and the true meaning of captivity.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

As I began reading this short story I was expecting an romantic love story, that is not at all how it turned out.  During the first few pages of the story you meet a family consisting of a grandmother, three children, a mother and father.  The dynamics of the family interested me, the grandmother played a big role throughout the story, but the mother maybe said two words.  The father seemed to be a grumpy, impatient man.  The setting of the story is primarily in a car as the family is on vacation.  One piece of the story that foreshadowed what would happen is when the author explained in detail what the grandmother was wearing on page 354 and even states "anyone seeing her dead on a highway would know at once that she was a lady."

The author also used irony during the beginning of the story when the grandmother threatens the children with the Misfit, the criminal who had broken out of prison.  At the end of the story the family is in a car accident and the Misfit is the man who approaches them on the side of the road and eventually kills them.

Irony was also used with the cat the grandmother had secretly brought along caused the accident to happen while the family was driving down a back road trying to find the plantation the Grandmother had remembered was in a completely different state.

"A Gift for Magi"

What a great lesson of symbolism and irony this story provides.  This is one of the first readings I really enjoyed reading.  Magi, a distraught younger women, wants to buy her husband something great for Christmas.  The couple has been going through financial struggles and she only has $1.87  to buy a present for Jim.  There has always been two things Jim has been very proud of in life, his pocket watch and Magi's long flowing locks of hair.  In a state of panic Magi decides to cut her hair and sell it to use the money for a nice chain for Jim's pocket watch.  She finds the perfect chain.

When Jim arrives home he is shocked as he walks through the door and sees his bride, now with less hair.  Jim sits down as Magi pleads for him not to be upset with her.  Jim hands Magi her Christmas gift, a set of brushes she has been wanting for quite some time.  Jim had sold his watch to buy the brushes.

The symbolism of the unselfish love they have for each other also adds irony to the story, they each sold their prized possessions to provide the other with a material gift.