Peter's Blog

My short story is set during the Battle of the Coral Sea, 1942. This naval engagement was the first ever battle between aircraft carriers. The Japanese looked to take Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to control nearby islands and cut off Australia from U.S. supply lines. The Japanese sent an invasion convoy with three aircraft carriers for air cover: the Zuikaku  and Shokaku , and a smaller light carrier, the Shoho . To counter the Japanese, the U.S. sent the Lexington  and Yorktown . On the 7th of May, both American carriers launched aircraft against the Shoho , which was isolated from the other Japanese carriers. The attack was successful, and the Shoho  sank after several bomb and torpedo hits. My story takes place during this battle. Link to short story Link to bibliography

The Tralfamadorians of  Slaughterhouse Five  see all of the past and future at once. Instead of living in the moment, they see every event that will happen ahead of time, and as a result don't care about the future. This makes sense; if you think about it, reality is just a bunch of events that lead to other events. Even our thoughts, feelings, and decisions are determined by past events. So why shouldn't humans think the same way as these nihilistic Tralfamadorians? The underlying difference between humans and Tralfamadorians is how they perceive time. Tralfamadorians are able to view their own decisions--and the consequences of those decisions--before making those decisions in the first place. As such, they don't ever truly  make decisions; everything has already been decided for them by fate. Humans, however, are unable to see these decisions ahead of time. This is a bit of a blessing in disguise; our inability to predict the future means our decisions actually matte...

Slaughterhouse 5  introduces beings that can see all moments in time at once, the Tralfamadorians. I've been pondering how exactly this would work, given what the book tells us. Instead of being time travelers, the Tralfamadorians live their lives in real-time, and are only able to perceive the future and past. Their philosophy revolves around the fact that the future cannot be changed, even though they know about all future events ahead of time. If you think about it, though, this doesn't really make sense. If I knew I would be hit by an MTD bus on my way to Kenney tomorrow, I would obviously stay on alert the whole way, and likely take another route entirely. However, according to Tralfamadorians, there is nothing I can do about my impending injury. How can this be? Perhaps their visions of the future, combined with their philosophy of acceptance, are a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. When a Tralfamadorian sees their own death, they immediately accept their fate, and ...

I've seen a couple of recent blog posts talking about the ending of Ragtime , and whether it's a "good" or "bad" ending. The answer, of course, depends on which character you observe. Tateh and his new family get a happy ending, while Coalhouse and Father straight up die. So why is this? Ragtime  has no single protagonist. There are multiple characters that we see as good, virtuous, etc, but they don't work together for a single cause. Rather, the "good guys" all have their own plots to follow. Tateh's quest to improve his life takes place while Coalhouse thirsts for revenge, the former succeeding while the latter arguably fails. The same can be said of the "antagonists": Father and Harry K. Thaw are both dislikable characters, but only Father has a "bad" ending. All of this stems from Doctorow sticking closer to reality and history, as opposed to the fiction we're used to. In most fiction novels, the protagonist...

As we've observed and discussed, Doctorow goes out of his way to only use full names for characters who actually lived. Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit are given full names, while Tateh and Sarah are only ever referred to with their first names. Father, Mother, and Mother's Younger Brother aren't even given names at all. However, there is one exception: Coalhouse Walker Jr. In class today, we briefly touched on the origins of Coalhouse as a character. He is based on another character, Michael Kohlhaas, from a book of the same name by Heinrich von Kleist. Kohlhaas has his horses unfairly confiscated, and is unable to get them back. He then wages a mini-war, killing several, as revenge. However, Kohlhaas is also a fictional character. So why is Coalhouse given a name? Perhaps Doctorow believes von Kleist's work to be historically significant enough to give a spin-off character a full name. I think this is unlikely, as Coalhouse is only an adaptation of Kohlhaas, not a...

In these final few days before the end of the year, we've watched an exciting struggle for dominance of a man as much around him works against him. I'm talking, of course, about Mr. Mitchell's heroic battles against Room 106N's technology. Mr. Mitchell's "call to adventure" came on Monday, when the speakers stopped working for some reason. His "ordinary world" consisted of verbal class discussion of physical books we've read, so choosing to show a digital video was already a form of "crossing the threshold". This time, however, the common tactic of restarting everything didn't yield desirable results, and this is where I think the true "call to adventure" is. Here, Mr. Mitchell had been forced to seek outside help. He initially "refuses the call" by continuing to try to fix the issue himself. At last, though, he sought help from the IT guy. (Was it Mr. Coobs? I think it was Mr. Coobs.) Mr. Coobs would b...

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...

A while ago, we discussed Vardaman's narration and how it's difficult to understand him thoroughly. Mr. Mitchell mentioned that entire essays were written deciphering his words, so I figured, why not try some of that right now? On page 53, Vardaman starts off by comparing the now-dead Addie to the now-dead fish he brought home. He says that it's now cut up into pieces of "not-fish", with his hands stained with "not-blood". By calling the fish's remains "not-fish", Vardaman seems to be trying to wrap his head around the fact that once a living thing dies, it stops behaving like its former self; once the fish is killed and cut up, it no longer behaves like a living fish, and Vardaman seems to think it's no longer a fish at all. He then says " she is getting so far ahead I cannot catch her." His shift from referring to the fish as "it" to "she" shows that he is confusing the fish with Addie, or simply tryi...

Although  O Brother, Where Art Thou? contains several supernatural events, being based on the Odyssey , Everett stubbornly refuses to believe in such things. He frequently asserts that anything that happens has a rational explanation, often to our comedic relief. This is in contrast to the Odyssey , in which the main hero (and everyone else) believes the gods to be real, despite both stories having similar supernatural events. When Everett and the others first meet the blind handcar driver, they are told that they will find fortune and experience many extraordinary things (including a cow on a roof, heh). Everett, of course, seeks a rational explanation, insisting that the blind man buried the treasure himself. Similarly, when the three men are incapacitated by the "sirens", Everett doesn't think the toad is Pete, even though he has no alternative explanation as to where Pete is. The most notable example of Everett's secularism, however, is in the final few scenes...

In The Odyssey , the gods are interestingly unpredictable. In class, we discussed how, though the Phaeacians worshipped Poseidon for years, Poseidon still decided to screw over one of their boats along with their scenery as punishment for helping Odysseus. I've always thought of the Greek gods as completely rational overseers of the mortals with strong moral compasses, but these incidents make the gods seem more... human. The above example of Poseidon's actions is a perfect example of this. He holds a grudge against Odysseus for blinding Polyphemus, and ends up taking his anger out on his followers when his plans to prolong Odysseus's journey are thwarted. This is a very "human" phenomenon: when we get angry and frustrated, the source of our problems often isn't the target of our anger. Other gods besides Poseidon seem to exhibit similarly "human" characteristics. Athena helps Odysseus while Poseidon seeks to harm him, showing that the gods can pic...

Back in my freshman year at Uni, during a free reading day in English class, I had forgotten to bring my own book. And so, I randomly picked Ender's Game from the bookshelf, and began to read. And hey, it was pretty good. (Spoilers below, in case you're also reading the book.) The novel tells the story of Ender Wiggin, in a world where humanity is recovering from two attacks by an alien race of "Formics". Earth's International Fleet (IF) is desperately seeking new leaders to attack and suppress the Formics before they launch a third invasion. Ender's two elder siblings have shown promise in the eyes of the IF, but have been rejected for their personality flaws: one is too ruthless and the other too compassionate to make a good leader. The IF allow Ender's parents an exception to the two-child policy, and Ender is born. Ender is accepted into a "Battle School" for similar children, where they compete in teams against each other in zero-gra...

Sorry to Bother You  is an interesting film, to say the least. For the majority of the film, everything seems believable and realistic, and suddenly they're turning people into half-horses. So why was this part of the film? The most obvious reason for this sudden change is the shock value. Before the scene where Cash tries to find the bathroom, WorryFree was the most shocking thing the corporations had created. Many of us have heard of tech giants using factory labor for their products, so a lifetime labor contract doesn't seem too far off. By showing how suddenly WorryFree shifts from exploiting humans for labor to modifying the humans themselves, the film gets us to worry about the real world. Tech giants have been using factory labor for years, how long until they do something similar? (Though it wouldn't be as drastic as in the film, with the recent advancements in gene editing, how long until a factory uses this to make their laborers stronger?) The film sends a me...

In Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle , Gunnar Kaufman begins his story by telling of his early life as a black boy in a white community. Among his white friends, he's known as the "cool black guy" with a sense of humor. Gunnar himself doesn't mind this, and even embraces it, saying "white kids will believe anything anybody a shade darker than chocolate milk says" and using their gullibility to his advantage. At the same time, he is aware that he's not "as black" as pure black communities, refusing to attend an all-black summer camp because they are "different." When his family moves to Los Angeles, a mostly black community, he is quickly targeted by the local gang due to his lack of street knowledge. Overall, Gunnar is "blacker" than the average white, but "whiter" than the average black. Many of us have also probably gone through a similar experience. In our respective middle schools, we were among the ...

The end of Part 1 of Beloved  reveals a rather shocking moment in Sethe's (and Beloved's) history. Sethe is caught in the process of killing off her children to save them from a life of slavery. I find it interesting that this scene, unlike the other books we've read this year, greys the morality of both black and white characters. In Native Son , we root for Bigger as the protagonist as he resists the antagonists: Jon, the court, etc. In Invisible Man , the narrator faces the evils of multiple organizations that try to use him. However, in this part of Beloved , Morrison leads us to question if Sethe is completely good, and the four horsemen are completely bad. Up to this point, we've seen Sethe's struggles as she escapes Safe Home, which painted her as the protagonist struggling against slavery, an evil practice. Here, though, as she tries to murder her children, we question her judgement. Even if her intentions were good, was this horrifying scene really nece...

Countee Cullen's "Thoughts in a Zoo" is basically one huge analogy, relating the racism between blacks and whites with zookeepers keeping animals trapped in a zoo. Oddly though, in his poem, the conflict doesn't seem as one-sided as the white/black conflict was. Right off the bat, Cullen starts with "They in their traps, and we in ours". Are both sides equally trapped? Zookeepers are definitely less trapped than their animals... A little further down, he refers to a "gaunt eagle whose raw pinions stain the bars", some animals that "delve down like the mole", and snakes, who watch with a "changeless slothful eye". These seem to refer to different types of reactions from blacks' oppressed state. The eagle has been fighting futilely for freedom, the mole has been hiding (like Invisible Man's narrator), and some have been simply watching, neither actively accepting or denying the oppression. But once more at the end, h...

Throughout Invisible Man , the narrator is forced to move from one organization to the next, each of which have a different idea of what part Blacks should play in society. Near the end of the book, the narrator comes to realize just how easily manipulated he has been, and how following his grandfather's advice only made things worse. Despite his constant movement from setting to setting, the narrator's briefcase remains with him as a treasured possession. The items inside, meanwhile, are various trinkets obtained throughout his journey: his high school diploma, the shattered Jolly N bank, a paper with his Brotherhood name... In Chapter 24, though, the narrator is assaulted by a flock of birds and their droppings. He uses his briefcase to shield himself, quite unlike how careful he has been with the briefcase in the past. Later, when he falls into a manhole to escape Ras, he burns the briefcase's contents for light. What does all this mean? By burning the briefcase...

Cornelius Eady's  The Wrong Street  is formatted oddly: line breaks are placed seemingly haphazardly, cutting statements in half more often than not. In class, we briefly discussed why Eady chose to do this. Someone (I forgot who lol) suggested that Eady intentionally tried to make his poem look unorthodox, messy, and unprofessional, to convey a tone of desperation, as if he wanted to get the message out as quickly as possible and didn't have time to format it properly. Or maybe he's writing out the poem while words come naturally to him, not bothering to go back and format them. Looking more closely, each individual line break actually provides a minuscule sense of mysteriousness to the poem. For example: If you could shuck your skin and watch         (Watch what?) The action from a safe vantage point,           (What vantage point?) You might find a weird beauty in this,          ...

In Chapter 9 of Invisible Man , the narrator discovers what Bledsoe has written in the letters he's given him. Specifically, Bledsoe requests that Emerson (and the other letter-receivers) keep the narrator away from the school, while keeping the narrator himself oblivious and hopeful. Later, alone, the narrator recounts the letter, speaking aloud to himself. "Please hope him to death, and keep him running," he paraphrases. Back in the first chapter, after the calamity of the narrator's high school graduation, the narrator has a dream with his deceased grandfather in it. He opens his briefcase and opens letter after nested letter, eventually reaching a short message: "To Whom It May Concern, Keep This N*gger-Boy Running." Up until the boiler explosion and the narrator's memory loss, he's constantly hopeful about his future, letting higher authorities control him. His grandfather planted a seed of doubt all those years ago, though, and it seems h...

Invisible Man 's first chapter contains some very strange events. Black students are forced into multiple events that have no place in a graduation ceremony. Looking deeper, this entire chapter is filled with metaphors that Ellison is using to show the extent of segregation between Blacks and Whites. Shortly before entering the battle royale, all contestants are blindfolded. They proceed to attack each other indiscriminately, swinging wildly until someone comes into range. Considering all contestants are Black, and the event seems to be planned exclusively by White people, it's fairly obvious that the Whites are turning the Blacks against each other for their own entertainment. Adding to this is the fact that the blindfolds used are colored white. Although in this particular scene the Whites are manipulating the Blacks merely for entertainment, Ellison might be suggesting that, in the real world, Whites tried to prevent Black uprisings and riots by turning them against each o...