Some Parallels

pg. 191 "One seemed totally indifferent to the people around him- simply eating and then smoking and staring off into the distance." To connect the theme of universal human behavior, Nettie describes a white man who sits indifferent to the Olinka people. In a way, Alice Walker links this white man to Mr. ____ who sat for so long on his porch while Harpo and Celie tended to the fields. He was indifferent to his family and home life as he starred off into the distance. I feel like there is a distinct parallelism between Mr.____ and the white man to show that their indifference, which is worse than hate because indifference is defined by a lack of care, shapes the way they are viewed and the way they view others. pg. 247 "But all things look brighter because I have a loving soul to share them with." Nettie describes her marriage with Samuel in such a way that invokes pure happiness. Likewise, Celie finds this same sort of happiness in her early relationship with Shug Avery. One major theme is the strong relationship between couples, especially between women. Nettie and Celie keep a sisterhood alive through years of mail; Shug and Celie keep a friendlier than friends type of relationship both of which epitomize love. Either way, both sisters realize the beauty of relationships.

I Was A Coward- I Went to the War

Courage is like an inheritance. True. We keep it locked up inside until those crucial moments where life demands more from us than we are typically used to. Aside from all this, fear is pint up inside in a similar way. It leaks out of people almost simultaneously with courage. Also true.

O'Brien wanted us to feel his guilt, his fear, his so-called cowardice. He uses what I believe is an antithesis on page 38 when saying that "certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons;" clearly he understood there was no certainty in the Vietnam War, or any war for that matter.

I thought the gross descriptions of the pig "Declotter" job built up to the parallelism of O'Brien's paralyzing choice towards "slaughtery" if he chose to accept the draft notice on page 41. We feel his frustration with his home town as he fears being judged, so he condemns them by saying, "They didn't know history..." (page 43). By combing all of the townspeople into a common pronoun "them," O'Brien uses a synecdoche to say that the people as a group are against him.

If I can clearly recall back to sophomore year, one of the stages in the hero cycle was flight. This is exactly the approach O'Brien took when he received the draft notice, until he came across the "hero of his life," Elroy Berdahl (pages 44-45). Berdahl taught him with few words in six days that absence of fear does not make one strong, for the only conclusion O'Brien left us with at the end of the chapter was that he "would not be brave." He let embarrassment of having to face all the people in his life make the decision for him to submit himself into the war. How often are we too pressured into a route we're not too fond of due to the driving force of peer pressure. Leaving us with a paradox, O'Brien tells us of his drive home, "... and then to Vietnam, where [he] was a soldier, and then home again. [He] survived but it's not a happy ending. [He] was a coward. [He] went to war" (page 58). 'Coward' and 'war' just don't mix in my mind.

Fight and Flight

Chapter 26 immediately begins with a bad omen: "In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea... The plateau was dull and gloomy, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed." All of the diction in this weather description indicates bad things to come. As the day progresses and the chapters proceed, we find ourselves reading about Vicente Girones who was killed during the bull run by a bull who was eventually killed by Romero... the bad omen doesn't let us down! Cohn later beats up Romero, who has the final fight the next day. Jealousy takes over Cohn, and after he hurts Romero significantly, he flees! We don't hear from Cohn the rest of the novel (which in my opinion is a relief!).

On page 222, there is one large exaggerated sentence describing the actions of Romero with his bull before he kills it in the center of the ring. The length of the sentence depicts the smooth, yet exaggerated nature of bull-fighters as they dodge the bulls. Parallelism comes into play as Romero kills the bull "that had sprinted out and killed the man in the morning running" (pg 223). As Romero defeats this bull, his actions are paralleled with the fight he had earlier with Cohn. "The fight with Cohn had not touched [Romero's] spirit but his face had been smashed and his body hurt."

The gloomy weather lingers over the deaths of bulls and men in the run of the last day of the fiesta.