Everyone needs Excitement.... Ordinary is Terrible

        Chapter 2 of the story Death of Ivan Ilych opens with a sentence that reads "Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible" and when you continue to read the chapter, it proves to be very true. It seems that Ivan Ilych didn't have any kind of will to live his life the way that he wanted to. He always did the predictable and what was seemed to be expected of him. The story states in detail that he did not marry because he was in love but because it was the right thing to do and it gave him satisfaction to do it. It seemed like his entire life he was just going through the motions, of going to school, getting a job, getting married, starting a family and never making connections with people and never doing anything just because he wanted to. Even the few instances that he broke out of ordinary, for example, having affairs and going to the whore houses was only because others of higher or the same social standings were doing those things and he figured he would also probably to feel like he fits in.

First person in "The Yellow Wallpapper"

       The story "The Yellow Wallpaper is written as a first person narrative and personally I really liked it. You really get a deep insight into how the main character of the story is feeling and you see everything from her point of view. It adds an intensity to the story but it is also unreliable because you only get to see the main characters point of view and you miss out on how everyone else in the story is feeling and the significance of their actions. But, for the sake of this story I feel that it was the best way to go. As the story moves along, the reader really gets to see and feel the character change because of the lack of contact with the outside world and how her loved ones, like her husband, isolate her until she really has nothing to do but imagine a life within the wallpaper that literally drives her to a point of insanity. Therefore it allows the reader to really get an understanding of how she felt and how those same feelings drove her to focus all her attention on the wallpaper due to the fact that she had nothing else to do. It brought me to the conclusion that it really didn't matter if you didn't get the insight into the other characters action and feelings because you can always assume what is going on with them.

What is time? Emily didn't know

Time has a huge significance, in the fact that it isn't significant, in the story "Rose For Emily". In regards to the setting of the story time explains why the language is different from our modern language and why certain words that are said wouldn't be considered appropriate today. It fits into the narration because it is a towns person that is telling the story after Emily's funeral and the narration is from the perspective of an outside person looking in at Emily's life. It really makes sense at the end of the story why time is not in a chronological order because we find out at the end what really happened just as the towns people found out; it also makes the story more interesting. When I was reading the story it seemed like time didn't have a specific meaning because the story kept jumping around and going out of order and it really ties in with Emily's personality because Emily had no respect for time, she made the world work to her liking. For example, Emily refused to modernize by getting something as simple as a mailbox because she loved the time or era she grew up in, where her family were the richest family and everyone looked up to them and the servants went to the post office to get the mail. It seemed like she was trying to hold on the life that she knew and liked, the life that she was most comfortable with and any kind of new reform she would simply not pay attention to it. Even the death of Homer Barron by the hands of Emily shows that Emily wanted him for as long as she was alive and wasn't going to take any risks that anything could go wrong so she killed him and kept his body with her to bend life and time to her will.

What lessons on Critical Thinking do you see in this video?

 

John Stewart, in the short video clip shown in class, brought to my attention a lot of important flaws in the way that the news presents information to the public. First off, when they talk to government officials about important issues and statistics are used, the numbers that are given are very vague, always given as a large range. What seemed to be the worst part is that no one bothers to comment on the wide range or even ask from what source the numbers come from. The main topic I understood from all his jokes teasing CNN is that they don't focus on the important issues. For instance, they allow a person from each political party to come on a show and debate or argue about an issue currently needing a resolution. The host, which is suppose to move the debate along just sits back and lets the argument go on without any direction and after about 5 minutes the host says that they don't have any time left and the debate comes to an end without any type of resolution. But, the most confusing part is that they have enough time to show a Youtube video that is irrelevant to the subject that the opposite parties are discussing. Lastly, the part that really got to me was watching the short segment where the reporters from CNN put in so much effort to prove that the "Saturday Night Live" skit of Obama's agenda, where they state that he has accomplished nothing, was false because they "fact checked" it. It really got me thinking as to why they can't but that much effort to "fact check" other issues so that when they are reported, they don't throw out such a large range of numbers, when giving statistics.