Poetry

I wanted to look into Esther's attitudes towards sex over the course of the book. In the beginning of the book, Esther is super freaked out by Doreen and Lenny having what was basically just weird sex. She pretty clearly feels unclean after this incident, as she bathed right after to both literally and symbolically cleanse her of impurity. In class, we talked a lot about Esther just generally seemed freaked out by the concept of sex and while I think this is true to a degree, I don't think it's the full reason why Esther has such a bad reaction to what happened. I feel like a lot of Esther's problem with what was happening was the fact that Doreen, who Esther had sort of idolized for being so in charge, was put in a submissive position. Esther sees Doreen getting called a bitch, bitten, and swung around while her legs are thrashing and she's shrieking. In this scene, Esther doesn't see Doreen as having any agency or ability to do what she wants to Lenny. She see...

I thought the parallels between what Mr. Antolini was trying to tell Holden and Holden's whole catcher in the rye thing were pretty interesting. The whole scene is well placed so that the reader still has the image of Holden catching children about to fall relatively fresh in their minds so they could see the connections between the children falling and what Mr. Antolini describes as a terrible, terrible fall. When Holden speaks of wanting to catch the children from falling, he's metaphorically speaking of preventing them from growing up and reaching adulthood. When Mr. Antolini is talking about Holden's "fall", he means his refusal to ever grow up. Mr. Antolini is essentially trying to act as the catcher for the catcher in the rye. The fact that this pushback is from a source that Holden trusts makes the scene more impactful. If it was from just anyone then Holden would probably be more willing to simply blow them off and keep on as before. But Holden spends muc...

            We spent a bit of time in class today talking about how Stephen feels like he can’t be an artist if he’s stuck in Dublin and why he feels he has to leave. I thought I’d look into that a bit further. Whenever I read of the book where Stephen explores Dublin have a sense of wonder that makes me feel like it’s not the place itself that Stephen has a problem with. Stephen has pretty strong negative feelings towards his parents and I feel his choosing to leave has more to do with his resentment for his upbringing rather than anything specific to Ireland.             When he was little, Stephen idolized his hyper-patriotic father. Towards the end of the novel, Simon Dedalus is seen by Stephen as more of jerk than anything. I think Stephen resents his father for causing their declining quality of life over the course of the novel. It wou...

I wanted to look more into the ways that Stephen views women throughout the story. More specifically, I wanted to look at what I see as the two opposite ends of what women can be. On the low end are the prostitutes that he visits and on the high end is the Virgin Mary He views the prostitutes as just a means to have sex. He feels a deep sense of shame in having been with them and sees them in a negative light. To Stephen, they are merely an outlet for his lust, and he views them as little more than this. From Stephen’s association between his habit of visiting prostitutes and his own damnation when he’s getting preached during the retreat, it can be inferred that his negative outlook on the prostitutes at least partially comes from his religious upbringing. He feels bad about what he has done mainly because he thinks it’s a sin and it’s immoral, so he views these women are sinners and immoral. On the other end of things there’s how Stephen views the Virgin Mary. S...