Peter's Blog

One thing that keeps catching me off guard is the TV in Room , the one Jack watches while he and his mother are held captive. Even though Jack is led to believe that everything shown on TV is from a different "planet", it still gives him quite a bit of knowledge about the outside world. For example, right before the helicopter incident, Jack spots an airplane in the sky and calls Ma's attention to it, knowing what it is. It confused me for a moment that Jack knew about airplanes, but not about things like vending machines. Jack also calls stairs "stairs" when he first encounters them, instead of trying to describe them like the other cases of defamiliarization we discussed in class. Keeping the Room's TV in mind, it kinda makes sense why Jack knows about some of these things and not others. Jack could easily have seen a scene on TV with stairs, but without characters climbing them; stairs are pretty common, after all. He would've asked Ma about i...

Who exactly is the "hero" in  A Lesson Before Dying , Grant or Jefferson? Both cases seem to follow Campbell's 12 steps to a hero's journey in their own ways. If Grant is the hero, the "first threshold" he crosses would be his first meeting with Jefferson. He "refuses the call" at first, until his aunt pretty much forces him to go. His aunt would then be the "mentor", as the person who convinces the hero to cross the first threshold. Grant is "tested" as he tries to communicate with Jefferson. He mostly works alone, with no allies directly helping him in his mission, and no direct enemies either. (Though perhaps Ambrose could be considered an enemy of sorts, with their differing beliefs.) He ultimately succeeds in communicating with Jefferson, but with the execution inevitable from the start, is this really a success? If Jefferson is the hero, most of the novel consists of his "mentor", Grant, convincing him to c...