20thcenturynovelblog123

               There was a lot to discuss when it came to Meursault, but something (or rather someone) that was quite overlooked in my opinion was Marie. I felt as though her reaction to Meursault, both initially and after the murder, was a bit odd, and it contradicted those around him. I interpreted Marie as the opposite of the rest of the characters in the book, who in my mind represented normalcy amongst Meursault's unique perception of life. With this polarization between the rest of the characters and Marie, I found it interesting to think about her interpretation of love and relationships, and why she stayed by Meursault’s side.                The main talking point of Meursault seemed to be his reaction to his mother’s death and funeral over him killing a man. Of course, it was an effective way to judge his character, but to focus primarily on that was misguided. The question at one point wa...

          It’s no secret that Jake and Robert had some tension in The Sun Also Rises . Evident in their fight, and the rocky aftermath, they definitely had some animosity toward each other. Jake described Robert as nice and friendly, only following it by calling him “bitter” (Hemingway 4). Jake uses these qualities to somewhat uplift Robert, but then immediately downplays his personality. Throughout the book, Robert Cohn’s friends used his Jewish identity as a way to express their underlying hatred for him.            More inconspicuously, he is referred to as “Cohn,” rather than his first name like the rest of the characters. Similar to how Lady Brett Ashley was commonly referred to just “Brett”–to emphasize her androgyny, as you can only mention her appearance so many times–Robert being called “Cohn” was likely to emphasize the fact that he was Jewish. By almost exclusively using his surname, the characters can point out...

  Virginia Woolf seemed to reflect her life onto her characters, and Septimus is no exception, though he captured parts of Woolf’s own experiences more personally than others. More specifically, Septimus captured the effects of mental health issues, and he also portrayed a complicated relationship with medical professionals. He was prescribed the “rest cure,” a treatment for multiple causes, but in his case, shell shock/PTSD. The rest cure, almost exclusively used for women, consisted of isolation aside from a nurse, feeding, and hearing soothing stories & topics from the nurse to keep away disturbing thoughts. None of this seemed to be pleasant though, with the first week’s diet consisting of only milk, or alternatively, 18 or more raw eggs, and the rest cure’s generally uncomforting treatments (Martin). Virginia Woolf was also prescribed the rest cure, though instead used in an attempt to cure bipolar disorder (National Library of Medicine). She likely used Septimus’s exper...

  “And escalators are safe: their safety the result (I now believe) of a brilliant decision to groove the surfaces of the stairway so that they mesh perfectly with the teeth of the metal comblike plates at the top and bottom…” (65)      Like many in The Mezzanine , that sentence is just the beginning of a shower thought, though Howie seems to have those outside the shower too. More notably, that sentence starts the longest footnote in the book, stretching across 4 pages. The small font size used for footnotes made it easily 5 pages worth of text, and it was only a side topic to the rest of the chapter. Especially considering how it appears relatively early on in the book, my immediate reaction to it was distasteful. However, rereading it, I realized how it served as a perfect example of Howie’s ability to stretch a seemingly uninteresting topic into something so much more.      Howie made connections out of anything, in this case, the grooves of an es...