20th Cent Elias

    So, we've finished The Sun Also Rises,  and I suppose it's time for my final blog post regarding it. I decently enjoyed reading this book and following the lives of the characters, but like many of my peers I found some of these characters' choices and actions questionable and/or mildly to wildly disagreeable. In this blog post I'm going to talk about how these actions made me view Jake and Cohn specifically, as well as give a summation of my final opinions of them.      Let's talk about the not-so-masculine, tough guy, super simp Jake. His character arc throughout the novel is almost a straight line, minus his loss of hope for a good life with Brett displayed at the very end. Jake presents himself as quiet and observing to the outside world, all the while hurling disparaging remarks about this, that, and the other inside his head for us to see. He can let out sharp remarks from time to time, but in the end only a fraction of what he keeps to himself. The reader

      Woah, it's the last post of the quarter. For this one I'm gonna tone down the seriousness and talk about time period. So, reading this book I've noticed a couple of weird details that have done an effective job at completely disorienting me. I know the book itself was made in 1926, but as for the setting of the story, I'm at a loss. I'll try my best to explain what I mean. So on the opening page, Jake introduces Cohn by letting us know that he was the middleweight boxing champion at Princeton. Now, this is totally baseless and I'm aware of that, but when I hear things like "middleweight boxing" and "Princeton" my brain automatically thinks of a relatively modern setting. I'm not very good with History (as you'll come to know better and better the more you read), but my weakest of weak points is reasoning when certain things were invented. To me, something like a middleweight category in boxing seems like something that wouldn

      So for my third blog post, I wanted to look at the character Septimus, since he was generally the character most difficult for me to understand. Reading the passages describing the inner workings of his head, often left me lost and confused as to what his character's message was. In this post I'm not going to attempt to explain that message (since I don't think I fully understand it even now), but instead I want to talk about the way mental health issues were presented in the book, as well as the parallels one can observe in real life.      First up, I want to talk about how Septimus is viewed by others. In Mrs. Dalloway we are given a glimpse of Septimus from both the eye of a passerby and the eye of a "doctor." Peter Walsh, our passerby, sees Septimus and Rezia in the park, during the middle of one of Septimus' episodes and dismisses it as a quarrel between two young lovers. Peter formulates his take on a couple seconds and a glance with no other infor

      So for my second blog post, I decided I wanted to write a bit about Peter. Peter sticks out to me as the character with the most incomplete story. I feel like he hasn't been given a proper resolution. Now obviously we're only halfway into the book and it would be an odd choice on Woolf's part to wrap up all the plot lines so early, but what I mean is that if you look at all the characters' lives as of right now, they all seem like they're coming to an end of the rollercoaster. Sally found some wealthy man to marry and now lives what one can assume is a happy life up in a large mansion near Manchester. Septimus leads a life full of ptsd, suicidal thoughts, and hallucinations, with little to no obvious solutions. Rezia might be stuck with this suffering man for the rest of their lives (It would would be a sad one, but still a resolution to their story). Hugh found a wife, and as far as we know lives a pretty good life. And perhaps from an outsiders point of view

     For my first blog post, I want to talk about how reading the Mezzanine during coronavirus has made me think about life before quarantine. Reading a book so focused on the material world, specifically the aspects of it you find in public, I've been missing the sort of day to day encounters with the objects one might come into contact with during more normal times. Since I haven't been able to leave the house recently, I haven't seen as many blow dryers, or escalators, or other things like that. Especially since these objects are found in places inaccessible to me at the moment because of the dangers they pose. While I hadn't really been thinking about escalators in the past few months, after reading this book, I've realized that I do sort of miss the constant effortless motion an escalator provides. And while they could be quite a pain, I also miss the sensation of a powerful blow dryer's pressurized air pushing my flesh off to the sides of my hands. These a