Poetry

Over time, as Gregor's family begins to realize that he will never be able to work, they begin to see Gregor in the self-deprecating way that he sees himself. They come to view Gregor as a burden on them. Their view of Gregor shifts to viewing him as less human as Gregor seems to become more human. At the beginning of the story, Gregor is solely focused on work and it seems like his whole life revolves around his job. He wakes up and leaves the house early and does not get back home until late. Even when he turns into an insect, he can only focus on how this change will impact his ability to perform his job. It seems like his only defining personality trait is that he works as a traveling salesman. In the beginning, Gregor sees himself as totally worthless because he can no longer work and provide for his family. When he first transforms, his family treats him as a human. While they aren't exactly the most welcoming of him, they do do things like provide him food and move the f...

            I think there is a connection to be drawn between the way that Hemingway depicts Jake’s injury and modern concept of BDE. For anyone who doesn’t know BDE is an acronym that stands for Big D**k Energy, which Urban Dictionary defines as “having confidence without cockiness”. It’s supposed to be a healthy, lowkey way of feeling yourself. In essence, it means that you’re secure in yourself. While one doesn’t have to be well endowed or even have a penis at all to have BDE, the basis behind the term being named that is pretty self-evident. As a society, we conflate this feeling of confidence with masculinity. There’s a reason that we make reference to a penis in a term whose meaning doesn’t imply a gender.             This brings us to Jake. To the outside, Jake seems like the most masculine person there is. He is interested in things like fishing, bo...

While reading and discussing Mrs. Dalloway, I kept thinking of two very similar questions. The first of these was “do Clarissa and Richard love each other” and the second being “do Septimus and Rezia love each other”. There are no clear answers to either of these questions provided in the book. After finishing the whole novel, I feel like most people would answer both of these questions with the same response: “it’s complicated”. The reasons behind these similar responses are pretty clear. The dynamics of both of these relationships have many parallels. The most striking of these are the problems caused by characters lack of feeling. Clarissa and Septimus both express through the book that they recognize that they can no longer feel strong emotions. After the war, Septimus notes the fact that he no longer feels and a large part of why he decides to marry Rezia in the first place is in the hopes that he will develop feelings. Clarissa consistently brings up how she fe...

When I first started reading Mrs. Dalloway, I was apprehensive about what was to come. While I appreciated the insights from Mr. Mitchell and other classmates on The Mezzanine and I had come to respect the novel for what it was, I personally just couldn't get over the fact that I found the book a mind-numbingly boring slog. Fearing that Mrs. Dalloway would be similar to The Mezzanine because of the way it tracks a character's internal monologue, I didn't even want to start it and procrastinated doing the first reading until 4th hour before class. Now, 47 pages into the book, I find it hard to put down. I thought for a while about why this was the case for Mrs. Dalloway and not The Mezzanine and I concluded that the biggest reason for my interest in Mrs. Dalloway was the inner conflicts that Clarissa Dalloway has, specifically the one relating to her relationships.  Even from reading less than 50 pages into the book, it is apparent that Clarissa Dalloway is a ...