Retreat

In the story “a Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, the main character retreats from society in order to hid from a reality that she finds unbearable. This is what many of us have a tendency or urge to do under some circumstances. Why would people want to retreat from society? Is it something that is healthy to do? In my opinion, I found retreating society sometimes perhaps it’s a healthy things to do after an extreme traumatic experience. For example after the loss of a love one or a dear friend, one may need some time along to settle down one’s emotion by being alone for a while in order for someone to overcome the pain and move on to live. It’s necessary for one to be alone when one tries to grief for someone’s death and something unsuccessful in life. This only becomes a problem when this type of grief slowly turns into a negative virtuous cycle where one begin to trap oneself into a cycle of negative self-talk and eventually led to depression. When it reaches depression which may cause people to eventually become a recluse who hides away from society, this is when retreating from reality becomes a bad thing. 

Free Write

Mother’s day is coming up. The end of this semester and school year is also coming up. Lots of things have happen in the past few weeks. Things seem to have kind of slow down since I have finished all my AP exams. Before the AP exams, everything night and day I’m constantly worried and tried to cram AP materials in my head for AP Chemistry and Psychology. One may say that cramming isn’t a good way to learn things and it’s useless. I find that without cramming, I will probably fail my AP exams and spend the rest of my life depressed and guilty thinking why didn’t I tried to study for the test and hoping I have a time machine which can send me back and fix the mistakes. After getting the AP stuff all finished, I feel like I’m getting a bit slacking off and needed to get my focus back to catch up with the rest of my non-AP class which I usually spend less time on studying. Everyday seems as if there are challenges and works that I needed to catch up on. Never one day can I fully be relaxed and not to think about homework and studying. I guess this is the life to be a student.

I Hate Poetry

Without knowing why, many people complain, “I hate poetry! I never understand it.” I will say I was once that type of person when I’m ignorant and lack appreciation literature and artistic value behinds it. I know poetry can sometimes be so intricate and complex that people may be annoyed by the fact that it is too difficult for them to understand. They may find poetry to be retarded that none of the things make any sense and poets are just crazy to love creating this kind of literature where no one understands it. However as I grow up and come in contact with more poetry, I find poetry can actually be fun and inspiring to read. For example, Emily Dickenson poems include and inspire new aspects of life and death through the flows and intricate designs of diction. After reading the poems, it’s as if one is learning a new lesson in life that sometimes our thought correspond to the theme of the poems and it helps us express some of our inner thoughts too. Reading poem can really open one’s literature knowledge and skill. Poems may be frustrating to understand at first. However after through some deep analysis and understanding, one can find that poetry can have some curative effect like listening to a song. 

Horror

What makes a story scary? What elements contribute to a tone of horror? There are many ingredients that make a story scary. The most classic type of method is the used of suspension and then an unexpected horrific scene that creates fear within people. Usually the story will be set in a dark and quiet night, with squeaky doors and weird sounds that follow through the plot line as the protagonist walk through the hunted house. Usually the author will use descriptive adjective to make the setting vivid as if the audience is looks at in a moving picture. To create fear in people, author usually describe unusual event such as people never came out of the hunted house once they entered to give the audience a hint that things are not normal and it can go wrong any second. Also as the protagonist goes through the event, he or she will usually make some stupid mistakes that if the characters are travel in groups, one by one the character will be attacked by monster or disappear until in the end only the protagonist survive and witness the biggest scary event. The use of foreshadowing creates a sense of insecurity in our mind that we know for sure that nothing is going to work out right and it can happen anytime before we know it.  

A Journey

I don’t think Prufrock from the poem “The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock” experience a journey or quest that the hero starts in a happy state, is somehow forced to go through a difficult quest, experience some loss and gain and eventually returns back into happy state again. Prufrock seems to be stuck in the middle of the quest that he is undergoing a difficult quest of whether or not he should ask the question, which is probably asking a woman out. I can imagine that Prufrock is once a confident with high self-esteem that he from a relatively wealthy family who has afternoon tea session which other high social class member. Due to age, Prufrock seems to be extremely worried on how people will view his physical appearance and examine him like a bug specimen and nail him on the board. This aging process is seemly a quest for Prufrock that as a middle age man, he isn’t married yet. He is afraid to ask people out as he used to do when he is younger. He seems himself as relatively useless and is said that he is just like an observer in the story of Hamlet that he is not the hero.

Prufrock Revisited

In the poem “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock”, Prufrock’s stream of thought seems to demonstrate that people are spiritually empty and contemporary life is unromantic and unheroic. However in my point of view, the poem seems to only demonstrate that Prufrock only think of himself as spiritually empty that he rather be a paired of lobster claws than a human being. As the poem shows, Prufrock seems to be worried about how people view him physically that he has thin arms and white hair. Although in the poem Prufrock didn’t explicitly tell us that he didn’t dare to do and want to do, through inference we can kind of tell that Prufrock seems to be in love with a woman and he is afraid to ask her out, which is the question he kept worry about in the poem. Prufrock worried to further move his relationship with the woman to a romance type of relationship because he is afraid that the woman might say that is not what she meant. In a way, I don’t think Prufrock thinks of contemporary life as unromantic and unheroic. He is just one low self-esteem man who is afraid to take action and can’t take rejections of the world. 

Anti-hero

As a noted scholar Joseph Campbell once said, “The hero is today running up against a hard world that is in no way responsive to the spiritual need. Modern society has become a stagnation of inauthentic lives and living that evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our potentialities or even our physical courage.” The world we live in today is basically hostile to heroism that makes many people observers rather than participants in exciting adventures. I certainly agree that J Alfred Prufrock from The love song is an antihero, who is extremely egocentric and disillusioned. In the poem, Prufrock is a man of passivity. “Do I dare? Do I dare?” Unlike a hero, Prufrock is unwilling to take any physical action to pursue his goal. Instead he only overly worries himself over it which makes him depressed and lack of self confident. With such negative self talk, Prufrock wants to be a paired of ragged claws, scuttling across the silent sea as if he willing to become thin air and disappear from society. This kind of talk makes Prufrock an observer instead of an active participant who wants to contribute some action to the world. As the violence of war raged the earth, people no longer believe in heroes and believe the best thing to do in life is to sit around and do nothing.