isabella's blog

Although I am not done reading the book yet, already Holden seems to be an ureliable narrator. This is partly due to the fact that he is in a “rest home,” but also due to the fact that he seems to be so broken that he sees the world as everyone being out to get him. This makes him seem unreliable, because he is telling it from his perspective which seems to have many different sides that he’s feeling. For instance, when he goes to see his old history teacher, Holden depicts him as being an old grouch, who is out to get him. But in reality, although Mr. Spencer has failed him, he shows genuine concern for the boy, and I feel that Holden knows it too, because he too seems to show affection for the old man. He is just looking for reasons to not like the old man. His actions are very different from his opinions.

At first I really did not like Holden, I thought that he was cynical and just was the cause for his own problems in his life, but after reading further into the book, it became extremely obvious that his personality and the way that he treated people was just a deflection of his true feelings. Holden is a very depressed and lonely person, but he refuses to admit it to himself, which I feel is part of the cuase of this mental break down of his. The way that he chooses to see the world, and the way that he acts around people, is truly just a deflection of his own feelings. Throughout the book, Holden continues to lie to people, and to himself, and these lies are generally ones about other people. This shows his inability to have peoples’ “eye’s” on him, as he is scared for others to see him as he truly is.

. So far I really like it, the author has done a very good job with depicting the mind of Holden, and it makes the story really realistic. I am looking forward to reading further into the book.

Although I am not done reading the book yet, already Holden seems to be an ureliable narrator. This is partly due to the fact that he is in a “rest home,” but also due to the fact that he seems to be so broken that he sees the world as everyone being out to get him. This makes him seem unreliable, because he is telling it from his perspective which seems to have many different sides that he’s feeling. For instance, when he goes to see his old history teacher, Holden depicts him as being an old grouch, who is out to get him. But in reality, although Mr. Spencer has failed him, he shows genuine concern for the boy, and I feel that Holden knows it too, because he too seems to show affection for the old man. He is just looking for reasons to not like the old man. His actions are very different from his opinions.

At first I really did not like Holden, I thought that he was cynical and just was the cause for his own problems in his life, but after reading further into the book, it became extremely obvious that his personality and the way that he treated people was just a deflection of his true feelings. Holden is a very depressed and lonely person, but he refuses to admit it to himself, which I feel is part of the cuase of this mental break down of his. The way that he chooses to see the world, and the way that he acts around people, is truly just a deflection of his own feelings. Throughout the book, Holden continues to lie to people, and to himself, and these lies are generally ones about other people. This shows his inability to have peoples’ “eye’s” on him, as he is scared for others to see him as he truly is.

. So far I really like it, the author has done a very good job with depicting the mind of Holden, and it makes the story really realistic. I am looking forward to reading further into the book.

Although I am not done reading the book yet, already Holden seems to be an ureliable narrator. This is partly due to the fact that he is in a “rest home,” but also due to the fact that he seems to be so broken that he sees the world as everyone being out to get him. This makes him seem unreliable, because he is telling it from his perspective which seems to have many different sides that he’s feeling. For instance, when he goes to see his old history teacher, Holden depicts him as being an old grouch, who is out to get him. But in reality, although Mr. Spencer has failed him, he shows genuine concern for the boy, and I feel that Holden knows it too, because he too seems to show affection for the old man. He is just looking for reasons to not like the old man. His actions are very different from his opinions.

At first I really did not like Holden, I thought that he was cynical and just was the cause for his own problems in his life, but after reading further into the book, it became extremely obvious that his personality and the way that he treated people was just a deflection of his true feelings. Holden is a very depressed and lonely person, but he refuses to admit it to himself, which I feel is part of the cuase of this mental break down of his. The way that he chooses to see the world, and the way that he acts around people, is truly just a deflection of his own feelings. Throughout the book, Holden continues to lie to people, and to himself, and these lies are generally ones about other people. This shows his inability to have peoples’ “eye’s” on him, as he is scared for others to see him as he truly is.

. So far I really like it, the author has done a very good job with depicting the mind of Holden, and it makes the story really realistic. I am looking forward to reading further into the book.

Isabella Shattenkirk

I just finished reading the book A Streetcar Named Desire,  by Tennessee Williams.  The book ended with Blanche going completely crazy and being taken away to a mental institution. I actually really enjoyed reading this book. I did not like it very much at first, but I just got so interested in the characters by the end that it sort of canceled out the choppiness of the play.

Desire and dependence plays a HUGE role in this story.The women in this story are completely dependent on men, as they use them to make them happy, and it causes a lot of problems for them. Stella is extremely dependent on Stanley, so much that when they met, Stella had to change for Stanley. Before she was a high class girl who looked down on Stanley for being common, but her desires for him caused her to change who she was, even though he was not the best man for her.  Due to her need for him, she has a baby and stays with him even though he beats her. She even goes as far as to believe him over her own sister when Blanche is raped.

Blanches dependence on men and her needs for them to desire her results in her descent into madness. Her efforts to hide who she really is, and show herself and her lifestyle the way that it ought to be causes her to start to lose her sense of reality. What set off Blanches mental decline is when her husband shoots himself, and she was so desperately in love with him, and dependent on him, that she was never the same again. She lost her innocence,and her family.So she turned to her looks, which began to fade. Losing everything, she began to go into her own little world to try and pretend that things were the way they ought to be, but by the end she loses her sense of reality. There was a lot of forshadowing of this happening, with the polka music playing when would go into her own world, and the shadows on the walls that only she could see.

Stanleys rape of Blanche was the high point in the story. It was kind of unavoidable due to the fact that they had so much tension between the two of them. The reason that Stanley and Blanche did not get along was due to the fact that they were complete opposites, but were entirely similar in the respect that they were both losing what they cared about the most. Stanley by the end of the book, was starting to lose Stella, and Blanche was aging and losing her looks. These two things caused them to hate eachother, but they also had sexual desires which resulted in Stanely raping Blanche. Stanley also did this to show his power over Blanche, to reassure himself that he had power and authority in his life.  The rape and when Stella didn’t believe Blanche,were also the breaking points for her sanity.

A streetcar named desire. By Tennesee Williams

I am currently about a half of the way through reading the play A Streetcar Named Desire.I have just stopped at the part where Eunice gets beaten by her husband, but after saying that she is going to the police, you find that she actually went to the bar to get a drink, and then subsequently, she gets back together with her husband.

Although at the beginning of the play, I felt that Blanche was going to be the villain in the story, what with her barging in, in her fancy clothes, and looking down on her sisters lifestyle. But  as the story went on, I began to pity her, and her situation. As it is revealed in the play, Blanche seems to have “lost” her family in one way or another because she has been basically exiled from where she grew up. She has also lost all of her money, leaving her basically with a trunk full of gaudy clothes and fading looks. She refuses to be seen in bright lights, whereas a softer light is more deceiving towards her age and beauty. I feel like this has a deeper meaning, like she doesn’t want to be shown as her real self, hinting to the reader that she is definitely hiding something.

Stanley is definitely going to be the villain in this story. To me, he seems like a very creepy and shady character, who is in an entirely physical relationship with Stella. It becomes obvious to the reader this out because Stella goes straight back to him after he is violent multiple times. She is found saying to Blanche that when he do Stella replies that her physical relationship with Stanley “make[s] everything else seem—unimportant. When Stella decides to go back to Stanley after her beats her, it shows that Stanely does feel sorry for what he has done, but he has not been forced to learn from his mistakes and therefore does not truly understand what he has actually done. You know that he never does because there are multiple incidents where Stanley becomes violent, each time he shows remorse for his actions,and then he does it again.  I feel that this foreshadows a much darker act of violence, or just a more unforgiveable act, that is going to happen  sometime later in the story.

I really like this book so far. I think the reason why I enjoy this play so much is because of the way that Tennessee Williams has written it in such a realistic form. It make a lot easier to  formulate your opinions of the characters, as well as put yourselves in their shoes.  I do not like however, the fact that this was written in play form, due to the fact that it makes the reading of it go a lot slower, and it makes the story seem a lot choppier. Hopefully my views will not have changed by the end of this book.

Water for Elephants: A novel by Sarah Gruen.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I like how it was a realistic fiction novel, because along with Sarah’s descriptive style of writing,  it was really easy to imagine what was going on inside of the novel. Gruen definitely did her research on the lifestyle that was for circus folk, and  what it must have been like for them during the time of the Great Depression.

My least favorite character would have to be August. He is cruel and abusive, and I especially do not like how he takes out his anger in the form of inflicting pain on others. Although it is later revealed in the book that he suffers from Paranoid Pchysiofrenia, I actually don’t believe that Uncle Al was telling the truth when he told Jacob that. I believe that it was a ruse to make sure that Jacob would feel bad for August and not cause any trouble.

After reading the book I discovered that there are two main themes in this book. One is about finding yourself, and finding your life’s direction. This Becomes a major theme in the book, because most of the people in the circus are trying to find themselves, and figure out what to do with their life.  For example when Jacob is running to catch the circus train, the narrator says,”This is so odd…I’m running beside a moving train in the middle of nowhere”.^[6] What the author means by that is that Jacob at that point, as he got onto the train, had nowhere to go, and had no idea what he was going to do with his life. He had left his college, and his parents were dead. But, when he got on the train, his entire life truly started. Jacob began to find himself.

The Second theme of this book is that people need more than just the basics to be happy and fell fulfillment in their lives, but when they lack freedom, the characters do not get fair substitutions for fulfillment. For example, Marlena puts herself into her marriage with August, and is in love with him, only to find that she is not truly in love with him, due to the fact that he is angry and abusive. Even though what shes seeking is love, she does not truly find it until Jacob comes along. Another example of this would be when Rosie was forced to drink nasty water, when that was not what she really wanted.

Isabella Shattenkirk

Water for Elephants

At this moment, I am about halfway through with reading the book, water for elephants by Sarah Gruen. I just stopped at the point where the elephant Rosie was performing for the first time, and she freaks out and runs out of the tent and off to a random woman’s vegetable graden. In the process of her “stampede”, Rosie seriously injures Marlena, by basically throwing her off of her back. Back at the tent, August gets violently angry and takes his bull hook and starts lashing it at the “ignorant” elephant.

My favorite character in the book so far is the Elephant Rosie. Although she doesn’t really listen to direction, there just has to be something wrong with her that prevents her from listening, because she is obviously very smart. For example, when the lemonade keeps going missing before each show, it turns out that it was Rosie who was removing her stake out of the ground, going and drinking the lemonade, and then going back to her spot and putting it back into the ground. I personally find it very disturbing to see the way that Rosie, along with many of the other animals, are treated horribly, even though they are very important to the show and don’t do anything wrong.

It is very upsetting to see the difference in the way that the performers and the workers are treated. The performers get the best of everything, and are always accommodated, while the workers get really bad treatment, such as docked pay, or if they become an inconveinience they are red-lighted. The workers are basically treated as animals. But this does not only happen among the humans. The main animals of the show, such as the cats, are usually fed and treated properly, whereas Uncle Al makes the lesser animals go days without water, and or food.

Jacob, the main character, I have very mixed feelings about. Although I understand why at such an old age he is cranky and rude, especially with his situation in the nursing home, but he needs to learn how to keep his mouth shut, or say what he feels in a different way , because it keeps getting him in trouble. I am not saying that he should not have stood up to that old man,and told him that he did not carry water for elephants because he was right, but he should have said it in a way that would have gotten his point across. I do really like the 23 year old version of Jacob though. He is young and a very caring person. I feel really bad for him though, because his parents died, and he doesn’t seem like he is going to recover from that for a long time.

Overall, I really like this book. Even though parts of this book are dark and depressing, Gruen style of writing has a way of keeping you really involved in the book. What I feel contributes to that is how she switches between 93 year old Jacob, and 23 year old Jacob, so its like you are reading two books at once.

Works Cited

Gruen, Sarah. “Water for Elephants.” Ed. Alan Edward Bell. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2006. Print.