Final Paper

For the final paper I have chosen to read and discuss Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I am nearing the end of the novel and have so far enjoyed the book. Heller’s use of ironies, paradoxes, and just old-fashioned slapstick humor is very enjoyable. The generally humorous tone of the novel makes it a different kind of literary great and separates it from most other novels from the suggested reading list.


I plan to stick with the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and analyze the novel in relation to Biblical meaning. The parallelisms between the story itself and various religious references are something that stick out in particular to myself while reading. Of course on the off chance I don’t find enough material to write about however, I may find myself writing on a very different topic.

The Death of an Athletic Salesman

Brett Favre, Michael Jordan, Christian Laettner, Ian Thorpe, and many other athletes have all experienced it; a fall from fame. Some are affected by injury and illness, others have their accomplishments eclipsed by younger, stronger athletes, and a number just play their respective sports for too long. Brett Favre should have retired long ago, and Michael Jordan should never have come back out of retirement. But the type of fall from greatness that is the central idea of “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Houseman is that of Ian Thorpe, who was merely eclipsed by the faster swimmer, Michael Phelps.

The athlete described in the poem avoids the cold and heartless fate that awaits anyone and everyone. There will always be another that is better in some way, the world will go on. A stark contrast to the early death of the runner is the outcome of another athlete’s life in “Ex-Basketball Player”, by John Updike. Flick, one of the greatest basketball players to pass through a certain high school ends up living a monotonous life of a mechanic. Another example of this would be James “Boobie” Miles, in “Friday Night Lights.” A division 1 prospect and one of the best to ever play football for the Permian Panthers, football is all Boobie knows in life. So when he tore his ACL, Boobie’s life as he knew it vanishes and is left with nothing, as he fearfully sees himself in the men who come by to pick up the garbage.

Within this message is the question, what is the perfect time to die? Dying too early might prevent someone from achieving all they potentially could, and we all know what happens when you stick around for too long. Housman insinuates that there is a certain truth to the phrase “past one’s prime” and that this time period occurs very early, although an age margin is not specified in the poem.

The only way to overcome this tragic fate is to die too early to witness it. Thus the speaker of the poem does not view the early death of this great and celebrated athlete as a tragedy but more as a blessing. This escape “from fields where glory does not stay” will allow the runner to live on in greatness within the memories of others. Similar to the northern Germanic tribes, who believed that the only way to escape death was through one’s legacy, the speaker seems to view this avoidance of the decline of fame as the ultimate goal. Wistful and melancholy tones mixed with a slightly detectable yearning lead the reader to believe that the speaker is himself an athlete who once was great but now is forgotten. Several lines also indicate that the speaker is also somehow related to the deceased, either a pallbearer or a friend, or both. The reader can hypothesize that the speaker used to be the town hero until the deceased broke his or her record. It is not hard to believe that the line “the time you won your town the race” holds a certain amount of bitterness to it as the fame transferred from the speaker to the new athlete.

Housman, like John Donne, seems initially to challenge death, or better yet, welcome it. The young athlete who died in this poem is seen as fortunate, one who got the best situation. Yet the underlying message is quite cynical, for the deceased merely escaped the tragic fates that befall everyone by his own lack of knowledge. Although his “eyes the shady night has shut cannot see the record cut”, this still indicates that the record will be broken by another, better athlete and the sport and on the whole, the world, will go on. So the best course of action to take to achieve greatness is to hide one’s head in the sand and enjoy oneself- “ignorance is bliss- otherwise, there is no escape. (655)

Blomment

The discussion about the relativity of happiness to success seems to have been left unresolved in our class. One side believed it to be ludicrous to relate success and happiness with each other. The two terms are completely separate ideas and the saying that one is happy and therefore he or she is successful is null. According to this party, the happiness of an individual should never be an instrument by which to measure success. I tended to side with the arguments put forth by this group of individuals during the class discussion. The other side’s arguments were unclear to myself but I believe they were attempting legitimize the lifestyles of characters in the play by saying that if they are happy then they are successful.

The argument seemed to be at a stalemate when the second group couldn’t seem to comprehend Matt Rosenzweig’s comment that if this latter belief were true, then everyone would be happy because there would be something in every individual case that could legitimize them, no matter how successful they actually were. When presented with the counterargument of what measures success, we came up with one- the Greenberg scale. Although not a trained statistician myself, I constantly attempt to estimate the successes of the characters in the play along this scale.

There are obviously very few successful individuals in the play that we directly encounter, if any at all. This is easily seen even without the made-up, standardized Greenberg scale of success. Willy is an aging man who cannot afford to retire and is so bad at his job that he is on commission, not even a stable salary. His wife is in the same situation as he is, relying on their two sons to care for them in old age; but this turns out to be a poor decision. Their first son, Biff, is in his 30s and cannot find an adequate job because he is “restless.” This problem most likely stems from his high school days when he was a University of Virginia prospect. It is not uncommon to see former athletes unable to find their niche in society after all the fame, glory, and attention passes them by. How can one find solace in the joys of life after having played on the big stage in front of tons of fans? Their younger son, Happy, is somewhat better but clearly cannot support the entire family. He holds a respectable job with a decent salary, and the reader does not learn much of Happy’s personality other then that he seems to be an extreme womanizer.

Anyway you look at it, these individuals have contributed nothing positive to society or to themselves. A successful individual might be a selfish one, amassing a fortune for him or herself, or a generous one, giving up all possessions to help others. The Lomax family falls under neither of these categories and thus, I conclude, is not successful in any nuance of the term.

(496)

A Doll's House: Ken and Barbie All Grown Up

Up until the concluding scene of the play, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact message the author was trying to get across. One could imagine that the play was about women’s rights, but pro or con? The scenes contained so many sexist stereotypes and the date and era that the play was written and performed in can not help but confirm the reader’s suspicions that Ibsen was against women’s rights.


Upon further inspection, however, the reader can find much evidence of Nora’s attempts to cross over the gender lines in a positive light. Her actions are examples of what many prominent women would later do to help facilitate the women’s rights movement.


Initially, the reader sees Nora as a childish character, merely her husband’s pet. Then she confesses to Mrs. Linde her attempts to be an independent person, taking on work by herself and handling business matters behind her husband’s back; but even this is questionable as she approaches these matters with a substantial amount of naivety and blunders about quite a bit. But in the end, Nora has transformed into a motivated, driven individual who realizes what she wants for herself and is ready to do anything to achieve it. This when the reader realizes that her confessions of the secrets she had kept for many years was provoked by her jealousy of Mrs. Linde’s individuality and independence.


There is also a good amount of criticism of the male gender involved in the play. This can be seen in Torvald Helmer’s character, who is set up by the author in such a way that it is difficult not to dislike him. His selfishness and eagerness to look out for only himself is easily despised by the audience. Ibsen is making a point when, in the end, Nora decides to look for only herself and nobody else- clearly showing that she had crossed over the gender lines set by the society of the era and on to independence. (329)

Hamlet's Sanity- Part 1 in the Series of Analyses of the Works of Eric Tiberius Fram

“Hamlet's sanity became a question for me when I realized that he was going to change the course of his actions and of his life based on a conversation he had with a ghost.” This shrewd statement, by Eric Tiberius Fram, is one that I unexpectedly had to disagree with. Hamlet’s actions in the primary segment of the play point to anything but insanity. “However, while at the beginning of the play, the only person who comes into contact with the ghost in Hamlet, later in the play, Horatio too hears the ghost. This validates Hamlet's contact with the ghost as an actual event and not just a hallucination.” This statement, also taken from the blog of the Great One, nullifies the initial statement as Hamlet’s willingness to follow the ghost is given credibility, which was expected anyways as a survey taken in 2003 showed that more than half of the adults in the United States believe in ghosts.

“It is interesting to consider that idea that the main character of a Shakespeare play may possibly be insane. Since the play is centered around Hamlet, if he was insane, would the audience be seeing the story through the lens of a madman, or would the audience be able to tell the difference between the rumination of a madman and the actual events that occur?” This proposition is similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which questioned the effect that language had in shaping one’s reality. If there is no word for a concept, one can never truly understand the said idea. Similarly, the audience can never know if the recitation of the events they are seeing before them are accurate.

“In the end though, when all of the evidence is collected and compiled and analyzed, we must conclude that Hamlet is perfectly sane.” This concluding sentence proves to merely be evidence of one of the author’s few downfalls, uncertainty. The fact that Dr. Fram ever questioned Hamlet’s sanity when he decided to follow the teachings of Confucius in filial piety by listening to his father- regardless of the fact that it was actually an apparition of his father- or when Hamlet repeatedly made sure of the legitimacy of the ghost’s statements and delayed the murder of his uncle is silly.

I initially intended this to be a study of a piece of writing by a great man but I realize now that it kind of got out of hand and turned into a blatant criticism of all this man stood for in relation to literature. However, I stand unashamed because I am now done with my assigned blog- results that my fellow friend and Hava Java cult member will accept in return for his pride. (453)

Over and Over

I am truly glad that we read so many different Greek tragedies as a class because they are all stories of their own. It is nearly impossible to find any parallelisms among any of these readings. There is something new to be learned with each tragedy we encounter. For example, Antigone is the first time the reader sees an example of megalomania in the reading. In no other instance has a leader come to power because of his great deeds prior to the setting of the story and then caused his own downfall through his superiority complex. Creon’s state in the conclusion that is described as a “walking dead man” is the end result of his own hubris- I never saw it coming. The series of events that take place in the story were such a surprising, unique, and refreshing change that made the reading experience all the more enjoyable.


Seriously though, the comparisons between Antigone and Oedipus- used as examples because we’ve read them as a class- are unending. Yet we still analyze Antigone as an individual and unique story. Thus we must consider Creon’s actions and debate whether or not he is a good or evil character- as discussed in Robert’s blog. We must also question if he could have somehow prevented the Teiresias’ prophecy from coming to fruition had he proceeded to take a different course of action- as contemplated in Matthew’s blog. So we proceed to spend 4 periods of 50-minute time intervals each week discussing questions that nobody has the answer to. But my opinion remains the same, Norma Jean in the short story “Shiloh” did, in fact, jump off the cliff. (277)

And They Lived Happily Ever After...

Ronald Blythe’s statement that The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novel that evokes the “sheer desolating aloneness of dying” is, in my opinion, incorrect. I consider the intended main idea of the novella to be the irony that death is an escape from a lonely, barren life. Tolstoy makes this view of the difference between life and death through examples such as the expression on Ivan’s face in his coffin, “as if what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.” Ivan’s life, as described in the later chapters, is one full of monotony and routine; it is best described in a word, paradoxically, as lifeless. He marries simply to be settled in, lets his work consume his life, and does not build worthwhile relationships with other human beings. The first chapter does show that Ivan Ilyich died truly alone, but this is not the cause of death itself, but instead it is a result of Ivan’s deeds in life. Ivan’s life is not special in any way in this particular society either; all of his “acquaintances” are guilty of the same faults. But it is exactly these faults that keep all members of the society in an inescapable cycle in which the roles of life and death are mistakenly reversed.


The thought that death is the ultimate reward and an escape does not come readily to most readers because it is not the generally accepted norm. As in Matthew Tibi’s recent senior speech, everyone seems to be looking for immortality, to live forever. I imagine that I was able to more easily see this theme because of how I had been taught in my religious faith, that death means an ascendance into Heaven and thus, is a good thing. Furthermore, death is one of the few things in life that all humans experience together, it is a universally shared experience. Although not the strongest argument, it still points to the fact that death is not the cause of an individual’s isolation.


The only character in the novella who seems to correctly understand this is Gerasim, who is the only character who does not fear death and, in turn, lives a good, cheerful life. He is also the only one who Ivan truly appreciates as he approaches death in his final days because Gerasim is the only one who does not have to lie about death and make it something it’s not- he speaks the truth. In essence, the story is filled with Tolstoy’s attempts to preach to the reader the importance of understanding life and death and their respective roles by repeatedly criticizing the lifestyles of the major characters involved. (443)