Colloquial Language


Several literary sources implement a clever colloquial language pattern in order to allow the reader to feel a verisimilitude through the conflicting plots of the event.  In "A Raisin in the Sun"  the expression "Gallllleeee" (p 492)  is used to show the lax speech mechanisms of its time period.  Huck Finn also used this rhetorical device in an even stricter method to make it appear like Huck wrote the book.  The verisimilitude the colloquial language helps to push the grim and very real themes present in these books.  It makes the themes seem less detached from reality and something that we as people should empathize with and analyze below the text.

Another of the text's colloquial impacts is the naming system used by characters.   The characters in a Raisin in the Sun portray intimacy by calling each other "Mama", or "Brother".  The simple family connotations of these words in contrast to calling people such as Ruth, well just "Ruth" exclude her from some of the family's "togetherness" and almost seems to fuel her heavy banter with "Beneatha".  This contrast of "who's in the family" and "who's not" creates almost a dichotomy between the two groups emphasized here just as gender seems to also divide the family into divisive sects.  The harshness of this compared to the reality portrayed through the dialogue truly impresses upon the reader a more realistic and analysis-requiring thematic plot line.

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

‘I spoke to her,’ he muttered, after a long silence. ‘I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window—’ With an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, ‘—and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’ ‘

Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.

‘God sees everything,’ repeated Wilson.

‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours and hurried back to the garage Wilson was gone.

(P. 170)

The symbolic significance of T J Eckleburg’s billboard contrasts Wilson’s Delusion like plants in a messy apartment.  The duality of godlike serenity and the absolute pettiness of human conflict are inseparable here as Wilson prays to Doctor Eckleburg to lay judgement upon his wife.  As a symbol Eckleburg represent the American Dream and its associative properties.  Eckleburg’s to himself displays just the man’s eyes and glasses, they are untouchable; there is no way to fight them, you can’t really kill them.  The mysterious ambiguity of it, in comparison to the “gray” suburbia entrapping it, subjects it to scrupulous idolization.

The way WIlson views Eckleburg as a God offers incite on the unreachable nature of the American Dream.  To Wilson, the American Dream occupies an unparalleled prestige in his mind which hard work can surely be the only way to obtain the success he seeks.  The tragedy of Wilson’s delusion of the American Dream is that he is so deeply brainwashed to believe in it, that he cannot conceive that “[It’s] only a commercial”  and like a commercial it’s formulated to sell some arbitrary product, like putting cigarette ads at the eyelevel of children.  Wilson’s undying commitment to the American Dream is epitomized by his own suicide.  The American Dream is likened to a cult in this way, its unmatchable simplistic beauty manipulates the people of the valley of the ashes into a docile proletariat people who allow the super rich, like Gatsby or Tom Buchanan to exist at the absurd plane which they live in.  The obligation to materialism is what Fitzgerald helplessly petitions against in the novel, and shows how it unalterably dooms those most susceptible to it’s false beauty.

Fitzgerald's Stances on Materialism


Fitzgerald takes a really interesting stance on materialism that's shown constantly throughout his novel The Great Gatsby, but dominantly through Jay Gatsby himself.  As we find out in chapter 5, he bought his mansion in hopes that he'd get to meet a girl whom he had romanticized in his mind.  Daisy, the girl, was something unattainable to Gatsby, she was "something" he could chase after and focus his mind and collective being on.  When Gatsby finally gets to meet Daisy and get to know her he crashes and realizes that she is not what he expected.  He describes his confusion to this saying, "his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one."  Daisy is compared to an object whose magnitude of disjointedness is quantitatively "one".  Fitzgerald is communicating that materialism is like a void in Gatsby's life, and it needs to be filled, constantly.  Suspense is built describing Gatsby's anxieties to meeting Daisy, his years of preparation meet  an anticlimax.  Gatsby's materialism drives him to fear stagnancy foreshadowed through Daisy.  Gatsby is foiled in this sense by Nick Carraway.  Nick epitomizes this stagnancy within his small home and busy job.  Nick carries a lethargy with him through his hesitancy to Gatsby's antics.  The two collectively show the relationship between wealth classes in a capitalistic society.  Gatsby uses Nick to achieve a "status symbol" and then once he's achieved this "didn't know [Nick] at all".  The way Fitzgerald intertwines the two characters puts these themes at the center of the story just as they were central themes in the early twentieth century america.

Bourgeois Capitalist 

Donkey
An inspiring comic showing a memory through visual rhetoric.

Author's note: The donkey's are not meant to represent anyone, and there is no significant reason for all the characters being donkeys.

In the chapter featuring Soaphead Church in Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye, Soaphead is compared to non-human things throughout the novel which dehumanizes his character.  Soaphead is a misanthrope, meaning he hated mankind, this suggests his personal superiority complex that will be strengthened  later in the chapter.  Soaphead is described as loving things, this makes sense that he would try to seek comfort in nonhuman things  in the face of his misanthropy.  Soaphead describes his wife leaving him as "She left me the way people leave a hotel room."  The comparison is to a place, not a thing- it lacks the emotional comfort to be a thing to him.  This blocks Soaphead's emotional viewpoint and works to loosen the empathy Morrison has built for him.  It also shows us how Soaphead believes he is above others on an emotional level, it implies an emotional stillness humanly impossible that Soaphead normally sees himself as having.  Later in the chapter, Soaphead  begins to compare himself to God, the inflated monstrous ego; this implies further works to dehumanize Soaphead to the reader.  The irony of this comparison is that Soaphead preaches about his good intentions with regards to helping people, while trying to downplay the pedophilia, molestation, fraud, and dog murder.  It can be said that Soaphead became the God he has criticized in his letter by refusing to adjust the course of his actions.   Chauvinistic gluttony consume Soaphead even in his most private thoughts.  

Soaphead Church from a play

Maureen Pie

“A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back.”  that describes Maureen Peal.  The description of her subtly put me on edge and i didn’t realize why until the third time reading it.  Morrison describes her hair as lynch ropes, the severity of this comparison brings to mind shocking images that contrast with the sunny child that they are describing. During the chapter "Winter", Pecola is being picked on and the other Breedloves rescue her, Maureen steps in afterwards and tries to comfort her conceitedly, as if her mere presence would fix the psychological mayhem just thrown onto young Pecola.  As they continue walking Maureen brings up a question that is obviously disturbing to Pecola and will not let it go rather than consider her adversity to the topic.  When the Frieda and Claudia intervene, things turn ugly and Maureen says “You ugly!  Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”  This climactic conclusion to their altercation makes us question her motives for comforting Pecola.  The outburst was likely representative of her conscious’ contemptuous thoughts on the Breedloves.  It Is likely that Maureen is condescendingly helping people who are in her eyes less than her to enable her own self. Morrison foreshadows this calling her hair “lynch ropes” which mirrors her actions which to utilize the misfortunes of others to further her personal agendas in the same way that she utilizes symbolic nooses as a beauty accessory.

Legos are a unique outlet for creativity that brought our generation to where we live today, unfortunately Legos also found a way to push gender stereotypes onto their anthropomorphic blocks while they were at it.  How the boundaries are put onto these block people is easy to understand, they create Lego sets which feature girls cooking, running a tour kiosk, and even shopping at a food market; whereas they feature boys as pirates, spacemen, superheros, supervillians, robots, cyborgs, dinosaurs, fantasy characters, construction workers, ninjas, and pet shop owners.  Something not so transparent is how these boundaries progress through our lives.  The toys put us into neat compartments letting toy companies label us as simply "boy" or "girl" essentially taking away our individualism.  The problem with these broad and generic labels is that it leaves kids out making them feel awkward and lonely only wanting a toy that they can relate to the way that everyone else seems to be relating to.  The toys we play with passive aggressively leave imprints on our behaviors, they teach us what is "normal" and what "isn't"; they teach us who to hate others, and in extreme cases: to hate ourselves.  

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: iconic man

To relate this on a personal level, one of the problems of the extreme masculinity placed in "boy's" toys is the way it dictates our identity to us as “MAN”.  The sinewed biceps and popping pecs of our superheros told us that someday that's who we would have to be, and anyone who didn't meet those standards was "weak" or a "girl" or other things too informal for this blog post.  The facade that is societal masculinity unfortunately has been environmentally conditioned in us since we were maybe two, it runs deep in our psyche and it breeds emotionally detached mannerisms within us from there.  The toys teach us a type of self-centeredness that perpetuates throughout our lives and unfortunately breeds fascism, hatred, misogyny, and contempt for anyone who would dare question the false masculinity we use unfortunately to cover up our tired, tired faces.  The problems that girls toys perpetuate are different, but equally potent and harmful.  It’s hard to say how we can as a society move on from these things, I think to desegregate ourselves from the mentally concrete dividers we’ve put up would be something extremely difficult, however, to do people need to educate themselves and realize that since before we could talk we’ve been programmed to act in ways that were out of our control from the beginning, and then from there decide to distance ourselves from the chains and shackles of gender boundaries.

In Jim Powell's Postmodernism for Beginners, he says "To attempt to represent Auschwitz in language--to reduce the degradation, death and stench to a concept--drowns out the screams.  According to Lyotard, it is therefore necessary that the Holocaust remains immemorial--that it remains that which cannot be remembered--but also that which cannot be forgotten.  Thus, any art attempting to represent the Holocaust should continue to haunt us with its inability to represent the unrepresentable, to say the unsayable.  It should continue to haunt us with the feeling that there is something Other than representation."  This brings to light a very important question: How can we talk about heavy, heavy topics like the holocaust without belittling the magnitude of the horror?  Is it through, art?  Literature?  Music?!??  Personal relationships?!?!?!?  Art Spiegelman attempts to talk about the holocaust in his graphic novel Maus.  His use of the graphic novel provides several aspects that are able to attempt to represent the horrors of Auschwitz for better than some trashy novella.  One way he does this is through his explicit use of visual rhetoric.

some visual rhetoric

A Map is shown above, showing the logistics of a long arduous march, as well as showing the realities of discrimination put on the shoulders of countless victims by showing a large mass of people on march.  A level of verisimilitude is also shown here by including an actual map layered over a mass of suffering individuals.  Maus embellishes the piece with symbolism, motifs, character develop, and like 18 layers of "meta"

Another example of World War Two literature to Maus to is Shostakovitch's Eighth Symphony, a powerful Russian piece of music about tragedy and chaos.  It was written right after the Russian won battle of Stalingrad, the turning point in the war for Russia.  It's dissonant patterns and tortured attitude allows for pensive thematic development and rich emotional context.

For the narrative type story that Maus is, a piece of music, or even straight up literature does not do it justice.  Maus creates a level of verisimilitude and nonlinear storytelling that is simply not suited for other mediums.  The graphic novel guides the reader to impactful realizations about the supported themes while not force feeding the information to the reader.  

"They are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards."  Primo Levi, a famous holocaust survivor, once said this about the camp bands of Auschwitz.  He talks about the Nazi's systematic use of music as a propaganda tool, as well as a medium, to demoralize prisoners.  The atmosphere created by the rhythmic and provocative beats of the camp's marching music, accompanied with the melancholy realization of the grim reality of the death camp, Auschwitz, is horrifically palpable.  The camp band is talked about in Art Spiegelman's book "Maus"; Art asks his father if he remembers the camp band, Vladek says, "NO, I REMEMBER ONLY MARCHING, NOT ANY  ORCHESTRAS..." (Spiegelman, 54)  The systematic use of music has made Vladek numb, the atrocities of Auschwitz have disassociated him from even music, leaving him a hollow, hollow, carcass of a man.  An image of the band is shown, and then shown again with a mass of worker prisoners walking in front of the orchestra covering them like a really uncomfortable blanket.  Art draws this to show how everything but the primitive necessities to survival dimmed to just senseless background noise mixing in and out of the confusion under the mortifying conditions of auschwitz.

"What the hell is water?" (Wallace, 232)  It's a question posed by two fish and it really captures the melancholy lifestyle where we dully just go through the steps of our lives, but i think it also relate's to feminism, or rather the opposition of feminism.  Over the week, as i quietly have eaten my lunch trying to keep to myself, there has been a group of boys who've since the beginning of the school year talked about their outrage over feminism.  You can probably imagine some of the things they've said, and other things i don't think i couldn't have even imagined.  I think a lot of the angst of anti-feminist individuals comes from backlash to, what they think is, a movement which makes them the enemy.  A lot of this also comes from not being educated on what feminism actually is, which Bell Hooks defines as, "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." (Hooks, 1)  However, a lack of education is no excuse for enforcing prejudices against, and the oppression of half the world's population.  There's a tendency to judge and stereotype people whenever it makes life simpler, and it's a poison that plagues the patriarchy.  It's the fuel behind jingoism, and institutional racism, and sexism on a national level.  As a society were slow and lethargic to making social changes, but i think it kind of starts on a local level and spreads out and expands from there.  I don't think I can say where we'll be in like 40 years from now, i don't think anyone can say for sure, but hopefully it won't be a place where people still will have to protest to be treated like people.

On Our Monotonous Lives

In David Foster Wallace's speech at Kenyon University, he mentions the mundane nothingness that is the adult workforce, describing it as "day in, and day out" (Wallace, 234).  This brought to mind our lives as Juniors, or specifically, my life as a Junior.  It got me thinking, what do i really do, like with my precious, and very limited time.  I try to use my time wisely, but who can say how much long I stare off blankly into the luminescent screen of my phone, or just blatantly do nothing.  It's a problem that plagues the human race as a whole, it's what truly blocks us from our dreams, and prepares us for a mundane 9-5 job and a lackluster family life.

(Pictured above: hopefully not me in 10 years)

I think there's a sort of mentality that's been embedded into our minds from a very young age.  We're told to follow our dreams, that we are truly capable of anything if we just worked hard enough.  But somewhere along the line that mentality's gotten distorted, to you can do anything you want that pays over $X a year, and you can't go to music school, and you can't be a zoologist, and you can't, blah blah blah.  I was talking to a friend once, it was about what we really, actually wanted to be, not the bullshit jobs our parents wanted us to have.  We talked for maybe 15 long and thoughtful minutes, i think i finished the conversation saying something about the difficulties of being a professional musician is, and the likelihood of me living out of a box somewhere on the streets.  And he said something like, "Yeah, that's a problem with a lot of youth nowadays, people are unrealistic with their dreams and end up ruining themselves."  It's not like he was wrong, our capitalistic society is fueled by crushing the dreams of the individual, turning them into our doctors, garbage collectors, and bus boys.  But I'm not sure how far that mentality can really take you.  The pressure I think that most influences my career is my terror of dying, 72 years old, at a desk, and being bald, at a desk.      "[Taking] risks is  jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down" (Ray Bradbury)

Gender Stereotypes We put on Children, and their Lasting Effects

One thing we see too often in a television show is a father figure who sees his boy child playing with girl child toys, and as we can all guess, he is outraged.  But why?  Why can't his boy child play with barbies?  Why do we gender these toys?  I was walking down the hall with a friend last week and i saw an abandoned pair of Sperry shoes, and i said, "Check it out (name withheld), those look like your new shoes", and he said "Nah, those are the girl Sperrys, I'm a boy."  We put ourselves in these boxes with neat labels, to make it easier for us as a society to determine who doesn't belong in a box, it's a system set up to screw the outliers.



















;jb




This is an ad from what appears to be a children's magazine.  Except it's not really an ad, it's more of a testament to our stereotyping system, and it affects our children in ways it really shouldn't.  In the image we see on one side a white girl, dressed  entirely in pink, wearing a dress, and holding her princess toy.  On the other side we see a very punk-rock looking white boy, pretending to play a guitar, with his hair messily tossed, while wearing a blue shirt.  The image that this sends our children is that girls are tamer, they need their hair in curls, and they need to dress in dresses.  It tells young boys that they need to be extreme, and love rock and roll.  The dangerous part of these stereotypes is that it tells girls that they can't play guitar, and that they have to be tamer than their XY chromosome counterpart.  For boys it furthers the stereotype of "manliness".  It tells them they can't wear pink, and they can't wear dresses, they have to be bigger than girls, and show it.  In these types of ads  extremes are shown, and then often if a child doesn't fit into this box, they feel panicked and wonder why they can't  be like that nice looking boy or girl in the ad, and too often they'll carry this uneasiness about their gender identities throughout their lives.

The Scratch In My Bass

The varnish was stripped, you could see the soft maple wood where a coat of varnish should have been, there were other marks too, the flamed varnish pattern danced within the bass, the elegant curve of the violin corners danced off of the bass, the upper bout had been slashed and it was this wound that killed it.  I stood in the practice room where the philharmonic orchestra was running through our repertoire. It was after our break when i had noticed what happened to my bass.  The gash was deep, deep enough to be a costly repair.  I thought about who could have done this to my bass, maybe a violin player carrying something heavy and in a rush scraped the cold metal edge of their music stand against the soft bout of my bass.  The cut was surrounded on all edges by a sea of varnish, it seemed to interrupted the bass's side like a person asking a very rude question.  The violinist who did this, they were probably worried, they were scared that they would have to tell what they did to their parents, who they know would be unable to pay the damages.  The guilt might overwhelm them, having to sit maybe 15 feet from the person whose instrument they vandalized.  The guilt would make them want to come clean to me with some sappy heartfelt apology, but it was always "Next week i'll tell him, for sure."  But next week would never really come.  

"Oh, Steve what happened to your bass, that looks bad!" my stand partner said.  The conductor raised his baton and we played 8 measures before he stopped to correct the cellos.

"What, happened, was your bass already like that?"  she said.  I looked back down at my bass.  The varnish was stripped and the maple wood of the bass peaked out like the baldness under an aging man's comb over.