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Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das's Strange Dynamics

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri has proven to be an interesting book so far, much different than the rest of the collections of short stories we’ve read in class. The stories are less heavy yet still have very complex characters, and I find them to be a breath of fresh air after we’ve been delving into so much material about child abuse, pain, and trauma. I especially enjoyed “Interpreter of Maladies”. Lahiri does an amazing job of fleshing out Mr. Kapasi’s character through subtle observations and thoughts, and the strange relationship/tension between him and Mrs. Das is fascinating to me. What I found strangest about Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi’s relationship was how fast it could change, and how drastically for two people who just met. At the start of the tour, it’s clear that Mr. Kapasi is just going through the dreary motions and as he deals with Americans all the time, nothing’s new to him. Still, I believe that he judges the Das family with more intensely than his othe
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Addiction in "Aurora" and Why it isn't a Love Story

In class, the main and first question posed to us was “is Aurora a love story?” Personally, my answer is a hard no. Not because it’s an incredibly unhealthy relationship (which also plays a factor because, in my opinion, you need to have some semblance of an actual relationship in order to have a love story), but because that’s not what “Aurora” is about. First and foremost, “Aurora” is Lucero’s story. It simply tells us about his life, and Aurora is simply a part of his life. She’s the only part of his life (that we know of) that he doesn’t feel secure in. He hates himself for always engaging with her, even when he knows he needs to drop her, which leads me to my main point. We already know that Lucero’s love for Aurora is an addiction- we discussed it in class and Diaz even makes a direct comparison in the text. Addiction is everywhere in this story. Everybody is addicted to drugs, Lucero thrives financially on addiction, and he is addicted to a girl who is toxic to
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Examination of "The Kid's Guide to Divorce"

For this blog post I decided to focus on “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce”. We only had ~10 minutes to discuss it in class and although I believe there are definitely more explicatable stories in Laurie Moore’s Self-Help , this especially short story is very effective at achieving its goal and worthy of exploration. The purpose of the story is to give its readers a look into divorce and how it affects a family through the eyes of a child. However, instead of telling us directly how it feels and supporting this statement with emotional and anecdotal narrative evidence (think how Baldwin’s narrator in Paris stated plainly that Paris is much better to African Americans than America, and that he was worried about his son Paul), Moore takes a more O’Brien-esque approach. Much like how O’Brien tried to create stories that would invoke in its readers the most similar feeling to wartime experience possible, in “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce” Moore attempts to place us in a child’s position and sho
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Jamie: A Product of Toxic Masculinity

In Baldwin’s “The Man Child”, Jamie presents himself as a very complex and, particularly following the ending, confusing character. He’s a bit of a brooding, mysterious type, but we learn a lot from his interaction with Eric and his fight with Eric’s father. There are many reasons and years of trouble behind Jamie murdering Eric, but I believe that the one main issue tying this whole mess together is gender roles and patriarchy. The event that started everything leading up to Eric’s death is Jamie’s wife. Jamie tries to shrug his wife leaving him off and act like he doesn’t care, but following her leaving, he very much deteriorates. He stops caring for his land, which has to be sold off, and winds up relying on Eric’s family for caretaking, becoming dependent on them as if he was their child (hence the title). There’s no way he wasn’t affected by being abandoned. In defending the idea that Jamie never actually cared for his wife, he references many of the stereotypical “wife” thin
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Esme and her Particular Branch of Innocence

In class, we talked a lot about what Esmé means to the narrator and why he finds her to be such a comfort. Personally, I believe that Esmé represents a break from the chaos going on around him. Right now, about to go off to war, everything is uncertain, terrifying, and real. Stumbling upon the children’s choir provided the narrator with a small haven of innocence and purity when the world around him is everything but. It’s very important to note that the practice the narrator witnesses is a practice instead of an actual performance, and Esmé, who he focuses on, is tired and over the whole rehearsal instead of enlightened and perfectly pure. Normally we associate the beauty of children’s choirs with the beauty of the special connection they seem to have with higher beings when they sing, as well as the fact that they’re all too young to be developing issues and negativity. The fact that the narrator finds the imperfection to be the best thing about the choir shows that there’s a d
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Salinger's Reflection of Human Life

As many have already stated in their blog posts, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger takes a narrative approach that is far different from the collection of short stories by Tim O’Brien that we focused on for a couple weeks, and I’d like to give my personal take on the narrative voice and what it does for the story. I found Salinger’s decision to be a reflection of life. Every single person is complicated and messed up, albeit on a very far-reaching spectrum of messed-up-ness. The thing is, we all know to some degree what’s going on in our own heads and how we ourselves are messed up, but there are so many people that we interact with on a daily basis who we will never truly understand. Instead, we rely on snippets of information gathered from observing a person and listening to what others have to say about them to create a vastly fractured idea of this person. Just like how in Salinger’s story we have a rough idea of Seymour after the phone call between Muriel and her
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Why Kathleen = Betrayal

The other day in class, we were discussing Tim’s lies and what they meant to us. Mr. Mitchell and some other students seemed incredibly frustrated by the fact that the biggest things, including the man Tim “killed” and Norman Bowker, were lies. Others believed that, in a work of fiction, we shouldn’t be surprised when the author gives us a little fiction, and thus didn’t understand why everyone was all up in arms about Tim lying. The last group of students, the one that I belong to, weren’t incredibly bothered by the majority of Tim’s lies but found his invention of Kathleen to be his most betraying and despicable lie, despite the fact that it’s arguably his most insignificant. Since credibility is such a discussed topic in this collection, I decided that for my blog post I’d give my own opinion, as well as an argument for why the lie about Kathleen was so frustrating. All of Tim’s big lies seem to suit some larger meaning. Inventing Norman Bowker gave him the opportunity to de
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