diza's blog

As I thought about Albert Camus’s The Stranger to figure out what this post would be about, I realized that I picture the novel in black and white. Maybe due to a subconscious association with the time period and film in the 1940s, I envisioned a grey world with only the scene with Marie in the water having any color. However, Camus does often introduce color in the novel. He describes girls in brown dresses and pink bows, the blue eyes of his mom’s caretaker, and red ties on the local boys (Camus, 6, 22). Despite Meursault’s objective details of color, the descriptions that stayed with me were the spectrums of “bright” and “dark” in the novel, fitting for an exceptionally grey character. Regardless of the moral questions surrounding his behavior, Meursault’s apathy is what translates to this lack of color. He has grey views and actions - inhuman qualities that inspire little empathy. These inhuman aspects center on Meursault's lacks . He does not hold any ground or stances and ha...

Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises watches several expatriates struggle with love and relationships, while maintaining nonchalant 1920s personas. The narrator, Jake, presents only a tailored version of himself to the reader, and hides most of his vulnerability within his thoughts and at night, when the audience to his story holds fewer watching eyes. His masculinity and capacity for emotion is the focus of the novel as he navigates a post WWI Europe. In 1920s Europe, sexual liberation and rights for women were the furthest developed for the time, and often considered completely equal. Women had taken up wartime jobs -although not to the extent as seen in WWII- as nurses, clerks, radio operators, truck drivers or other previously male-dominated occupations (Gilkison, 9). In The Sun Also Rises, we learn that Lady Brett Ashley had worked as a nurse in the war, and tended to the soldiers (Hemingway, 46). This was incredibly masculine and new - a woman working in a man's r...

Clarissa Dalloway prioritized parties, facades, and appearance. She placed large importance in the presentations of herself and the network of people she surrounded herself with. While in Regent’s park buying flowers, Virginia Woolf illustrated a cluster of people idling around a fancy motor car passing through, speculating it to hold the Queen. Clarissa, to ensure that the Queen thought of her with respect, made sure to present “a look of extreme dignity” as it drove past (Woolf, 16). Unlike the other civilians obsessing over the presence of royalty, she maintained a cool demeanor to make sure the Queen acknowledged her with such a superior appearance. Her facades were often presented, and made other appearances in the ending scenes of her party. She spoke the same cordial 6 words to everyone, creating the cheerful but disingenuous persona as a perfect hostess, as Peter Walsh anticipated. At this party, turning out very successful to Clarissa’s relief, she rekindled with her old frien...

     The passage where Howie and Tina interact in The Mezzanine stands out from the others, illustrating a mechanical way of talking with carefully thought out gestures and statements. Although Howie is found in other situations interacting with others, the specific scene creates a rigid environment that shows his approach to small talk. He is on his way to spend lunchtime break and runs into Tina, a co-worker. She tells him to sign a felt flower vase for the office trash cleaner, and they chat until she gets a call. Howie wants to leave and gives the mechanical gestures that mean he has to head off ("pulling up the pants, checking for my wallet, a joke salute").     Nicholson Baker illustrates this rigid routine as one that is required to be completed after Tina initiated conversation with Howie. He implies that the back and forth conventional steps are just necessary to maintain a good social appearance. He mentions this through comments such as “[Tina] ...